How often have you been frustrated by the ’speed’ with which Windows shuts down. It seems to take ages, especially when you are in a hurry.

If you normally shut down Windows from the ‘Turn Off Computer‘ on the Start menu, then here is an alternative that works almost like magic.

Read the full story

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get updates through email. Thanks for visiting!

Here is a simple trick to shutdown Windows quickly from a shortcut on your desktop rather than going through the Start menu.

Right-Click on the desktop and click ‘New‘ and then click on ‘Shortcut‘. When prompted to fill in ‘Type the location of the item‘, enter ‘shutdown -s -t 00‘ . Click Next and enter a name for the shortcut. You can now shutdown Windows through the shortcut. The -t flag lets you set the time lapse in seconds.

Changing the ‘-s‘ to ‘-r‘ will cause the shortcut to restart Windows instead of shutting down.

This may interest you: How to shutdown Windows almost instantly

Sometimes, when you want to shut down or restart Windows XP, you may see a dialog similar to the one shown in the picture. Even worse, this may happen persistently, thus preventing you from shutting down correctly.

The source of this problem lies in the fact that when Windows XP shuts down, each running process is given 20 seconds to perform cleanup work by default. If a process does not respond within this timeout period, Windows XP displays this dialog. To solve this problem, you can modify the default timeout by editing the registry. The time-out value is specified by the WaitToKillAppTimeout value under the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktop

This value is expressed in milliseconds. You can use Registry Editor to modify this value and then either restart the computer for the change to take effect or restart explorer.exe.