Speed Up Windows XP Shutdown

Does your Windows XP take endless long to Shutdown? This is mainly because whenever you attempt to shutdown Windows XP, it will wait for all running applications to close. If they stop responding, you’ll get the end task warnings and you either manually kill the task or wait for Windows to kill it.

Gili from AVirtualExit.com has discovered a registry hack which automatically kills non-responding apps instantly without interrupting the shutdown process. Before attempting this hack, please have a backup of your registry, just in-case something gets screwed up.

  1. Open Registry Editor from Start > Run and type “regedit” (without quotes)
  2. Expand the Registry Editor Tree and find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
  3. Edit AutoEndTasks Key from the right pane and assign to value to 1 (by default the value is 0)

Now, if you want to revert it back, just re-assign the value of AutoEndTasks Key to 0 or simple delete that key. Apart from the above hack, you can improve the shutdown/bootup speed by disabling unwanted service.

This post was published by on April 2, 2007

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://www.techmixer.com km

    Nice Tips, Any idea for the Windows vista shutdown speed

  • http://www.technospot.net/blogs/ Ashish Mohta

    Sounds like a good point for people who have lower hardware configuration.People should backup their registery before they make any changes

  • http://techmantra.net Vikram

    It is a nice trick thilak … this helped me a lot.

  • http://ajaydsouza.com/ Ajay

    There are a lot of software that automate this and is definitely not a recommended method to shutdown Windows. It is better to slow the shutdown and let all programs to close themselves. It is rare that you would keep getting prompted to kill programs. If that happens, then something is wrong in your installation.

  • http://www.linsonchan.com Linson Chan

    Not that useful… but useful :)

    // linson chan // 09198774095

  • http://cyberst0rm.blogspot.com cyberst0rm

    Read this article:

    http://cyberst0rm.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-make-windows-vista-shut-down.html

    Shows you how to speed up Vista’s shutdown.

  • http://www.computing-tips.com jason

    i knew about this registry setting but didnt enable it, after reading this I believe I will, Thanks