Increasing shutdown speed by reducing wait times

Windows XP stores a couple of values in its registry which are responsible for determining how long to wait before shutting down (killing) open applications and services once the shutdown command has been given.

By editing these two settings and changing them to lower values, you can considerably decrease the amount of time that Windows XP needs to successfully shut itself down. The first part of this tweak deals with setting the amount of time Windows will take to kill open applications on shutdown.

Open REGEDIT and navigate to ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\’
Highlight the ‘WaitToKillAppTimeout’ value.
Set it to ‘1000′ (the default should be 20000).
Now highlight the ‘HungAppTimeout’ value
Set it to ‘1000′ also.

The second part of this tip changes the same settings, this time for all users on the system.

Open REGEDIT and navigate to ‘HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop’
Highlight the ‘WaitToKillAppTimeout’ value.
Set it to ‘1000′ (the default should be 20000).
Now highlight the ‘HungAppTimeout’ value.
Set it to ‘1000′ also.

In the third part of this tip, we will alter a second registry setting to decrease the amount of time Windows XP will wait before shutting down active services after receiving a shut down command.

Open REGEDIT and navigate to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\’

Highlight the value ‘WaitToKillServiceTimeout’

Change this value to ‘1000.’

This should help to considerably speed up the time windows XP takes to shut itself down.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Windows XP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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