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.