Why does my machine take forever to shut down?
Hi everyone. Leo, Notenboom.
Here once again for AskLeo.com. You know the drill.
You click the Start button,
you click on Shutdown and you wait and wait
why it's not uncommon for shutting down a computer to take a fair amount of time.
Why does that have to be?
Well, we'll look at exactly why that is and look at a couple of different things
you might be able to do to at least, first of all, set your expectations
appropriately so you understand why, but also a few things you might be able
to do to speed up the process just a little bit.
One of the important things to understand
is that shutting down a computer it's a process, it's not an event.
It is a sequence of things that have
to happen for the computer to shut down cleanly.
It actually reminds me of one
of the original jokes when they introduced the Start button in Microsoft Windows.
How much sense does it really make to stop a computer by clicking on Start?
Well, it's because you are starting the process of shutting down.
Think about it.
There's a lot of software running on your machine.
There's the software you run, of course,
that you haven't necessarily closed out by the time you shut down the machine.
But there's also all this other stuff.
There's devices, there are programs that run automatically.
There's all the different tools
and utilities you have installed on the machine.
Each one of them has to be told, hey, you're about to shut down.
Is that okay?
And the reason each program has to be
asked essentially if it's okay to shut down is because it might not be.
You might have unsaved work.
That's the message that, for example,
Word uses to say, hey, you're about to lose some work.
Do you want me to save it first?
And it actually pauses the shutdown
process of the entire machine until you answer that question.
The same is true for just about any other software on the machine.
It all needs to be asked if it's okay to shut down.
Which usually means that that software
will then clean up whatever it needs to be cleaned up,
whether it be files on the hard disk or in the case even of device drivers.
They may have to go through some kind of process to cleanly shut down whatever
hardware it is that they're in control of or whatever else might be running.
You might need to disconnect
from an online service or save a document or whatever.
There's stuff that needs to be done to clean up as you leave.
Windows does at some point say, okay, I'm done asking.
I'm now telling you, whoever's left,
whoever's still running, we're shutting down, like it or not.
And that's typically when you get
the message that says, hey, these programs are preventing shutdown.
Eventually they'll either shut down or they will be canceled by force,
potentially losing whatever it is they were doing.
The key here is just that there's a lot of software, there's a lot of stuff
running on your machine and it all needs to have the opportunity
to shut itself down cleanly when you turn the machine off.
And yeah, malware kind of factors in here too.
Malware can in fact cause performance issues on your machine at any point.
But typically it's not the kind of thing
that you need to worry about as long as you're using good practices.
Normally malware manifests at other times in other ways.
It's not something you'll notice the first
time because of something that happens at shutdown.
So what can you do?
Well, first thing you could do is not run so much software.
One of the things that you might look
at is how much software is being run automatically when you sign into your
machine and decide whether or not you need it all.
Everything you turn off that never runs when you start up is one less thing
to have to go through when the machine is shutting down.
When I shut down a machine, typically I will actually close all
of the applications manually because I want to see where they're at.
I want to save whatever needs to be saved.
I want to at least know what state they're being closed in.
When that happens via Windows.
It's all kind of magical.
When I come back, I don't necessarily get
everything that I expect depending on the program we're talking about.
So I will go through and I will actually
manually shut down all of my programs one by one.
Then I'll shut down the machine,
or more often than not, restart the machine since that's what I'm doing.
Another approach, of course, is to leave the machine running.
I've got a few articles on that topic,
but the bottom line is ultimately that's what I end up doing.
The problem for those folks, for folks like me who leave your machines
on all the time, you're going to have to reboot sometime.
You just are.
There's going to be an update, there's going to be a Windows update.
There's going to be some other kind
of an update that is going to require you to reboot your machine.
Well, the first half of a reboot is
a shutdown, so you still end up with the same issue in those cases.
Finally, what happens if when you go
through the shutdown and some things go away, some things don't?
Maybe you get a black screen, maybe you get please wait.
But the machine never ever shuts down.
That's a problem.
It shouldn't happen.
That's something that should probably be diagnosed.
Unfortunately,
the only way to then force the machine to shut down is either pull the power,
which I generally don't recommend, or long press the power button.
Long press the power button will usually do the moral equivalent of removing power.
But in a slightly less potentially destructive way.
So by long press the power button,
I mean 10 seconds is usually what it's configured for.
That will usually cause the machine
to just turn off, you'll hear the power go away and everything will just shut down.
But like I said,
if that's something that you have to resort to and certainly if that's
something that you have to resort to regularly, that's a problem and should
probably diagnosed you're probably running the risk of maybe some data corruption,
data loss, something else going on that we don't understand.
Unfortunately, shutdown delays are never a single problem.
They could be many different things depending on your specific situation.
But at least now you have an understanding of why it takes as long as it does.
And a couple of things to look at if it seems to be taking too long.
For updates, for comments, for review,
related links and more, visit askleo.com/1929.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.