My computer has recently begun to shutdown very slowly, taking 12 Hours to completely shut down! When I click the “Shut Down” command the “Logging Off” message appears and around 12 Hours later the computer finishes shutting down and powers-off. How can I make this shutdown process quicker?

You are quite correct that 12 hours is a very long shutdown time for the computer! In fact, a normal shutdown should happen within one minute, so we will need to find a way that the shutdown can be made quicker. The most likely cause of this problem is a process running on the computer hanging on shutdown, and not closing thus causing the shutdown to proceed very slowly. To test this theory, before you shutdown the computer we will try manually closing all background programs and processes. So, when you are ready to shutdown the computer, first make sure that all programs running on the computer have been closed. Then, look in the Windows System Tray (i.e. the area beside the Windows clock) to see whether any of those programs can be closed. If they cannot, then don’t worry, as they will be forced to close in the next procedure. Once all the system tray programs which can be closed have been closed press CTRL-ALT-DEL to open the Windows Task Manager. In the Windows Task Manager window that appears, click the “Processes” tab. This will display all processes which are running on the computer. Click the “User Name” column to sort the processes by user name. If this column is not visible, go to the “View” menu > “Select Columns” and tick “User Name”. Once the processes have been sorted by user name, close all the processes running under your user name. You should be able to close all processes except ?explorer.exe? (the Windows graphical user interface) and ?taskmgr.exe? (the Windows Task Manager, which you are currently using to close the processes). Once this has been done, click the Windows Task Manager and try shutting down the computer. If the shutdown proceeds as normal, this indicates that one of those processes was stalling the shutdown. In this case, restart the computer and then close one of the programs or processes, shutdown the computer and check whether the problem continues. If the problem still continues, rather than waiting 12 hours for the computer to shutdown, force power off the computer (either by turning the computer off at the power point, or holding the computer power button down for 5 ? 10 seconds), then restart the computer and try again. Continue this process until you find the process causing the problem. Once you have found the process, try to find more information on the purpose of this process and what it does. Searching Google is an excellent way to research the true intention of such processes. If you find that the process is non-essential to your computer operation, you could disable this process from loading on startup which should prevent the problem from occurring.

To disable a process from loading on startup, go to the “Start” menu > “Run” and type “msconfig” (without the quotes) and click OK. In the System Configuration Utility window that appears, click the “Startup” tab. This lists all the processes which load on Windows startup. Locate the entry for the problem process and untick the entry. This will disable the process from loading on startup. Click OK and restart the computer. Hopefully the problem will no longer continue. Be aware, a message may appear when you restart your computer alerting you that the computer is running in Selective Startup Mode. You do not need to worry about this message, as it simply means you have selectively disabled some processes from loading on startup. You can safely click OK and tick the box to not display this message in the future.

However, in the event that closing all processes before shutdown does not resolve the issue, then please contact me again for further advice.