Sometimes, you might have noticed that your PC takes a lot of time to shutdown, which can be a bit annoying when you have to quickly leave and don’t want to leave your PC running, or shut it down improperly by taking the plug out. What you can do to decrease the shutdown time, is to disable the options to erase the system’s virtual memory and hibernation cache at shutdown. If the PC is still taking a lot of time to shutdown, give Speed Up Shutdown a try. It is a portable application that has options to reduce the time to kill applications, time to kill services and disable clear Pagefile at shutdown. You have the option to select one or all options to optimize your shutdown.
The application has a very simple interface. In the upper pane, you have options to toggle Reduce Timeout To Kill App, Reduce Timeout To Kill Service and Disable Clear Pagefile at Shutdown options. Click Start Speed Up after selecting the options to optimize the shutdown process.
The lower pane has Disable boot screen, Disable startup services, Check System Partition For Error and Defrag System Partition options. Clicking Start on the first two options take you to a webpage, explaining in detail how to perform those actions, while the 3rd and 4rth options open the processes open the command prompt to check partition for errors, and defrag system partition.
Even though we did not feel a significant difference in the shutdown time during testing, Speed Up Shutdown can be a very useful application if more options, such as force application close, are added and programmed to work. It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
