Why does Windows take so long to shut down?

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Red Squirrel

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Edit: Doh I meant to post this in Operating Systems, someone move please.

This is something that has always bothered me since like windows 95. Windows takes ages to shut down, considering it's... shutting down. IMO it should not take 30+ seconds just to "stop doing something" which is basically what shutting down is. I can understand bootup taking 30 seconds or a minute depending on startup programs and other factors, but why is it that shutting down takes so long?

This is really annoying especially with "SCRAM" shutdowns such as UPS running on battery and batteries being low, because it normally does not shut down fast enough.

It never really occurred to me just how bad this is, until I setup my HTPC with Ubuntu on it. I can make it shut down in about 2 seconds. I have the power button on my remote setup to close XBMC and initiate OS shut down. It does not feel like I'm shutting down a computer, it feels more like I'm turning off a dvd player or something. It's just that fast. Why can't Windows do that? Another thing that pisses me off is how half the time Windows will just hang and you have to force shut it down. This is not with any particular PC, I'm just speaking in general here. I see that on all PCs.
 
It writes back a ton of data to the hard disk when shutting down. Get an SSD and shutdown will be incredibly fast.
 
I haven't had a WIN7 PC yet that didn't shutdown in less than 30 seconds.
 
/me dons the Devil's Advocate mask...

People shut off their 'puters? Still? :p
 
Joe Average said:
/me dons the Devil's Advocate mask...

People shut off their 'puters? Still? :p
Click to expand...

You have to when the power just went out. Not that it happens often, but it's always good to have a proper shutdown proceedure in place.

Or in the case of dev/test environments. Nothing more annoying then waiting 30 seconds to a minute for a system to shut down just so you can wait for it to boot back up to test something that may take 1 second such as a startup script.
 
Ubuntu and other Linux distros can shut down very quickly due to how little it has running in the background. Even then, after being fully loaded with NFS, Samba, AV, and a slew of other server apps running, it only takes a few more seconds due to the low writeback needed for the OS.

Windows has considerably more running in the background, making it necessary to have more writeback to the drive, it's just the nature of how Windows operates.

As the others have said though, using a SSD will really help with shut down speeds.
 
Oh I'm just speaking in general here. I experience this mostly at work when working a lot with VMs and what not. It's just an annoyance that I don't see at home with Linux. You'd think MS could make their OS as efficient as Linux in that regard. If a SSD really makes a big difference, I'd like to see Linux installed on one. :D
 
I wouldn't even say its the hardware. My 4 year old laptop with a 5400rpm drive shuts down in about 10 seconds max usually less. It only has office and firefox installed on it, so maybe windows having a problem shutting down a service or application you installed?
 
@Red Squirrel:

Take a look at how you've set up your system. Sure, I've seen Windows systems that take a long time to shut down but that isn't just because "it's windows". A fresh XP install can shut down pretty much instantly. Any further delays are things the user has added. My XP, then Vista SP1, now Win7 installs all shut down in <5s at home. At work I think some loser set the flag in AD to write zeroes to the pagefile every shutdown (even though the entire disk is encrypted to FIPS compliance levels - talk about a paranoid waste of time) and there's a shutdown delay there.

If you've been experiencing it since Windows 95 and it continues today, I bet it's something you've got installed or a way in which you configure things. You're not in a domain environment with roaming profiles, are you?
 
Yeah I only ever had that problem when I messed around with the pagefile setting (or at work because of the slow network). Even on mechanical HDDs boot times on my rigs is well below 10 secs on XP 32 & 7 64 (more like 5 secs actually)
 
Surly73, it's very hard for me to believe that after a fully loaded OS you can get any of those to truly shut down in under 5 seconds, especially Vista. Even after I fully optimize windows and make sure minimal programs are running at boot up, it still takes about 15-20 seconds to shut down and best.

If they do shut down that quickly, how did you do that as even having a SSD won't allow a shut down in 5 seconds. Even with a SSD I have never seen any version of windows on any modern (2011) system shut down that quickly.

kalston, how do you get it to boot that fast? Maybe for a bare-bones fresh install of XP, but not Win7 and not in 5 seconds, even with a SSD there is no way.

I'm not saying you guys are wrong, but you may want to time what you are doing. ;)

Also, Linux distros, aka Unix-like OS's, is far different than windows in how it operates and manages files. Rather than using a registry, almost everything is written to text files and is a much better, secure, and efficient OS because of this and because of 'root' imo. Even a fully loaded Linux install on a single HDD (that is 5 years old) and with heavy encryption, can shut down in about 5 seconds.

This is why most people regard windows as bloated, and to be honest, it really is bloated, but mainly with security patches and every other background process working to keep it safe. It's really unfortunate but unless microsoft changes windows to work differently, it's going to be this way for the distant future.

Also, the most RAM I have ever seen Linux eat was 1.2GB by itself.
The most RAM I have seen windows use was 3.3GB by itself, bloated much? ;)
 
lol, I wrote boot time instead of shut down time, my bad. Was just about to type a huge answer when I reread my original post, haha, that looked amazingly stupid!

Anyway, my boot time is certainly NOT that low, although my laptop does 19 seconds on XP with a short stroked 5400rpm HDD (thank you super fast bios). My desktop (XP as well) does 30 secs (28 with the bios quick boot thing), but again it's a short-stroked dedicated (7200) drive and heavily tweaked windows install.
Still decent, and I very rarely shut down/reboot my desktop anyway.

Back on topic, yes my XP installs shut down in about 5 secs (at home) but I have nothing running in the background and they are really heavily tweaked (+ short-stroked, defragmented drives etc)

I don't remember 7 boot/shut down time but it didn't seem slower than XP last time I checked, I removed it recently so I can't verify this though. I'm waiting to upgrade my rig and get a SSD before installing it again.

And yes, Linux is definitely better at handling this.
 
munkle said:
I wouldn't even say its the hardware. My 4 year old laptop with a 5400rpm drive shuts down in about 10 seconds max usually less. It only has office and firefox installed on it, so maybe windows having a problem shutting down a service or application you installed?
Click to expand...

Good point, I actually have a laptop that shuts down pretty quickly as well...

On my main box, bootup takes an eternity due to the raid card's bios and detection routine. The shutdown on the other hand is reasonably quick assuming no apps are hanging/writing data to disk on exit. May have to time it to see, though from memory the slowest I've had my system shutdown was about 15 seconds.

BTW, OP if you are having issues with only having seconds to shut down your UPS you may want to upgrade it.

Let's try to keep the Windows bashing and Linux promotion to a minimum, since I think we all understand the pros/cons of each. And yes, linux does shutdown quicker :p
 
Red Squirrel said:
You have to when the power just went out. Not that it happens often, but it's always good to have a proper shutdown proceedure in place.

Or in the case of dev/test environments. Nothing more annoying then waiting 30 seconds to a minute for a system to shut down just so you can wait for it to boot back up to test something that may take 1 second such as a startup script.
Click to expand...

Three letters: U-P-S

(and I don't mean the shipping company...) :D
 
Joe Average said:
Three letters: U-P-S

(and I don't mean the shipping company...) :D
Click to expand...

Well I think that he was implying he had a UPS, but didn't have enough time to shut down? That's why I recommended upgrading the UPS, if the UPS can't handle keeping the computer up for 30 seconds then it's clearly undersized.
 
kalston said:
lol, I wrote boot time instead of shut down time, my bad. Was just about to type a huge answer when I reread my original post, haha, that looked amazingly stupid!
Click to expand...

haha, that makes way more sense! :D

Yes, a UPS has saved me and my server many times and really helps.

But definitely, if 30 seconds isn't long enough for the UPS to hold out while the system shuts down, a bigger UPS would be recommended as they should last at least 1 minute at a minimum.
 
I've never seen a UPS that can't stay up and running for at least 5 minutes, ever, in many years of using them even on a machine pulling 800+ watts + the other accessories plugged into it.

What the hell... 30 second runtime for a tripped UPS? That's like... so wrong it's not even funny. Can anyone say "DEFECTIVE"? :D

/me shakes his head...
 
What the hell... 30 second runtime for a tripped UPS? That's like... so wrong it's not even funny. Can anyone say "DEFECTIVE"?
Click to expand...

I can think of a few other things on top of a faulty UPS.

1. A highly underpowered UPS (ie the ones that look like a power strip and only contain a single battery)

2. Bad batteries. UPS batteries last around 3 to 5 years any longer than that you will have very low runtimes.
 
It's definitely a lot quicker with an SSD, but still longer than i would like. It's annoying that i have to shutdown but my PC will not recover from sleep because of a whole mass of reasons (OCZ Vertex2e, Asus P6T Deluxe, GTX470 i think all contribute to it) it's lame.
 
Joe Average said:
I've never seen a UPS that can't stay up and running for at least 5 minutes, ever, in many years of using them even on a machine pulling 800+ watts + the other accessories plugged into it.

What the hell... 30 second runtime for a tripped UPS? That's like... so wrong it's not even funny. Can anyone say "DEFECTIVE"? :D

/me shakes his head...
Click to expand...

It's not defective, each UPS has a certain wattage that it can output and a time limit if that peak is hit. If it goes over the peak load, the running time will decrease severely.

My UPS's are only rated at 255watts, and while not being meant for running 800+ watts, for my needs they work very well for network equipment and low-power equipment, and they don't cost an arm and a leg.

If you've never seen a UPS that can't stay up longer than 5 minutes, you've never seen a sub-$100 UPS, which for most users is all that is needed.

A lot of people do not want to spend $3000 on a PSU for their non-enterprise equipment. ;)
 
But it is hardware.

My Windows installation is bloated like nothing else, and shutdown times are still <10 seconds with an SSD. That's the best part about using an SSD...you really don't even need to keep your system clean to keep it fast and responsive.
 
ex0du5 said:
But it is hardware.

My Windows installation is bloated like nothing else, and shutdown times are still <10 seconds with an SSD. That's the best part about using an SSD...you really don't even need to keep your system clean to keep it fast and responsive.
Click to expand...

This is due to how much windows must shut down, so even though better hardware will help improve it, it mainly how the OS works as Linux distros shut down in under 5 seconds fully loaded and are almost instant if nothing is installed or running in the background.

It's not hardware that's the problem, it's definitely how the software/OS is managed and how it is optimized. If a SSD is needed for windows to shut down, I'd say it's time to do something different with the OS, but it's not really that high of a priority on microsoft's to-do list. :D
 
Guys, I haven't done any extensive "tweaking" or "tuning", even when using XP. I recall going through phases where shutdowns would be slow on one of my PCs, not necessarily my main home rig. Sometimes it's down to software which starts up, other times it may have been drivers which were installed. Once it was some stupid issue with the "power management" flag on the on-board IEEE1394 port. It had to be set to "allow to be powered off to save power" in order to not delay shutdown for 30 seconds.

For all you know the driver for that favourite mouse you've had since 1995 is the source of the issue. You should seriously look into some of these things. Long shutdowns are not inherent to windows, even with mechanical disk. Everything you add "could" be contributing, but any of my main home rigs are very complex with lots of software, drivers, codecs, add-ons etc... and it still shuts down fast - SSD or no.

On bloat... I'd be repeating something that's already been said more than 1000 times if I indicated that you can't compare the memory usage of post-XP windows with pre-XP windows or many flavours of UNIX. There's no point in having "free memory". Vista and later use it for SOMETHING whenever possible, whether it is cache, prefetch, superfetch, whatever. Instead of looking at the commit stats and complaining, have you ever "run out" of memory? If not, what's the problem?

As we want more "pretty" user interfaces and code becomes more modular bloat increases. I was just musing yesterday when working on my new archive system that each one of the RAW files from my dSLR would fill half of the first HD I owned on my Amiga. That's not bloat, that's progress and just the way it is. Firefox takes more memory than all of the RAM I had installed on my first decent linux box which I ran X-Windows on (16MB). IMO, as development gets farther away from assembly language and more into modules, objects, development kits etc... this is simply going to happen. On the other hand, the resultant code is more portable and happens on a faster development curve.

Oh, and my windows box shuts down in a fraction of the time it takes my text console-only linux server (running on an Athlon XP2600+) to shut down.
 
Surly73 said:
On bloat... I'd be repeating something that's already been said more than 1000 times if I indicated that you can't compare the memory usage of post-XP windows with pre-XP windows or many flavours of UNIX. There's no point in having "free memory". Vista and later use it for SOMETHING whenever possible, whether it is cache, prefetch, superfetch, whatever. Instead of looking at the commit stats and complaining, have you ever "run out" of memory? If not, what's the problem?
Click to expand...

Uh, no, having free memory is very necessary. Why would I want my OS, by itself, to eat over 2-3GB of RAM? That's rediculous. OS X eats about 450MB of RAM on startup, and fully loaded Linux distros can eat about 350-400MB of RAM. Windows eats 1-1.5GB if fully optimized, and if unoptimized it can eat over 3GB at start up.

Now, if all you do is use Firefox or just BS around on the Internet, then who cares.

But for those of us that use development apps that can eat a lot of memory like After Effects and Premiere Pro, we need to have as much available memory as possible since those apps can easily eat well beyond 6GB with just SD content.

Yes, Windows is bloated, I've accepted that it must be optimized and have no problem with it.

"Have you ever run out of memory?"
Click to expand...
As a matter of fact, I have, on many occasions with dev apps under Windows. Using those same apps under OS X, I have never run out of memory, and definitely not under a Linux distro.

I'm not comparing pre-XP OS's as they are obsolete and 10+ years old. I'm talking about modern OS's since 2006. Yes, windows has memory management problems and is partially the problem of shutting down a system relatively quickly.

Even though it may be a huge problem, it is not serious enough for microsoft to focus their efforts on since there isn't much of a gain with consumers on a business model or standpoint. Even though it isn't right, I understand their reasoning, and thus, windows will stay bloated and will require better hardware to continue to use. It's just the nature of the beast. ;)
 
Red Falcon said:
It's not defective, each UPS has a certain wattage that it can output and a time limit if that peak is hit. If it goes over the peak load, the running time will decrease severely.

My UPS's are only rated at 255watts, and while not being meant for running 800+ watts, for my needs they work very well for network equipment and low-power equipment, and they don't cost an arm and a leg.

If you've never seen a UPS that can't stay up longer than 5 minutes, you've never seen a sub-$100 UPS, which for most users is all that is needed.

A lot of people do not want to spend $3000 on a PSU for their non-enterprise equipment. ;)
Click to expand...


255 watts is not enough except for the very basic and I do mean basic system. My computers will not even run on a 255 watt system. A minimum of 800 watts is needed for proper UPS backup for almost any computer system. You can get a good UPS in the 1000 to 1500 range for less then $200 regularly and for $150 or less if you watch for sales.
 
No offense, but you'd spend - and already did spend - that rather significant sum of money on that amount of hardware then turn into a penny penching miser when it comes to the UPS that could a) keep your system up and functional during a power outage and b) protect it from a shitty power grid that could spike/surge your investment all to hell and back in a millisecond or two...

That doesn't make much sense to me, but that's just me probably.

Of course, I'm using a laptop which pulls 90 watts max with the AD adapter but I still have an APC BackUPS 1500 watt UPS to power and protect all the other stuff too.

Oh, and I paid $25 for it, brand new - some local office bought it, never used it and basically tossed it in a closet for 18 months. Retail price for this unit: $179 when it was new... ;) Also got it registered and heaven forbid it fail to protect the hardware that's plugged into it, that's $25,000 worth of insurance from APC to replace all of it.

YMMV, as always.
 
I'm pretty sure curlysir was referring to a desktop machine. If someone is gaming with their gpu cranked up I can certainly see a 255VA UPS giving up rather quickly :)

I'm right there with you Joe, I don't see the point in going cheap on a UPS particularly when you can find good deals on heavy duty UPS's.
 
Perhaps I should start shopping around, Joe. What are some brands that you prefer or would use and stay sub $200? :)
 
On ebay, you can get Server class APC 1500VA Smart UPSs with 2 hour+ run time for your load for less than $200 US shipped. Refirb with brand new batteries.
 
Red Falcon said:
Perhaps I should start shopping around, Joe. What are some brands that you prefer or would use and stay sub $200? :)
Click to expand...

craigslist is highly recommended if you've got a listing in your city or your area, that's where I find great deals on a ton of stuff - it's where I found that APC BackUPS I mentioned earlier, listed in the Business section (I found it with a search for APC UPS, however).
 
Joe Average said:
Three letters: U-P-S

(and I don't mean the shipping company...) :D
Click to expand...

Yeah but it's nice to be able to squeeze some run time then shut down when the battery is about to die. But with windows you need at least a few minutes of battery life just to shut down. And God help you if you have a Windows VM running in Windows and actually want to shut them down properly.
 
Honestly, I don't have a UPS to keep my stuff running, for any given length of time: I have one primarily for a) the surge protection which is vastly superior to a "surge protector" or some power strip that claims to have surge protection capabilities, and b) because of the $25,000 equipment guarantee that I can lay claim to IF this UPS actually fails to protect the equipment that's plugged into it.

For me, a UPS is insurance, not a battery, as odd as that might sound. It's a one time expense that can provide years of protection for a whole host of rather expensive consumer electronics equipment that if I had chosen to insure separately in other ways would end up costing me far more than the UPS did - even if I had purchased it brand new for the $179 retail price when I got it. Granted the protection provided is limited to strictly electrical issues - I can't file a claim for a new laptop with APC if the house burns down, unless of course the UPS is what causes/caused the fire, I suppose - it's still worth every cent in my opinion.

Makes some sense, right?
 
I've always wondered about the $25,000 (or w/e) guarantee. I'm sure that is so full of catches that laying a claim is probably next to impossible. But guess it does not hurt to try.
 
Timed my windows shutdown...12seconds

Total memory usage on bootup: 1.8GB

That's completely stock, with all my apps installed. Win7 isn't horrendously slow and not excessively bloated, imo.
 
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I've made 2 claims with APC in the past 10 years for UPS issues that resulted in a desktop and a laptop "frying" - they covered the retail cost of the hardware fully within 5 weeks, by check, without issues. No, it doesn't automagically mean if something goes wrong you get the full $25,000 - that's just the cap of the coverage and the desktop and laptop ran to about $2700 total.

That is the primary reason I will never own anything but APC products - they stand by what they sell, even if it costs 'em to do it. They have the reputation they do because they truly have earned it, in my book.
 
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