Windows is shuting down.........next day: "windows is shutting down"

[Waccoon]

Microsoft has had a number of Knowledge Base entries on this issue, and apparently, there's all kinds of things that can cause it.  WinNT has it, my Win2K machine has it, my dad's XP system has it...  you just have to live with it.

Something is not responding to the Term signal when Windows shuts down.

I can tell you what it isn't, though.  I've found power management has nothing to do with it, so don't bother fooling around with your BIOS, like I did.  ;-)

[Waccoon]

It just occured to me...  I used to have a problem with Win2K taking forever to shut down, and I found it was because I had too many files (more than 2GB) on my desktop.  When I moved a few huge files to the D: drive, shutdown times improved enormously.

Still, I think this was a known problem, and was fixed in a critical update.  My desktop is my working folder, and I still have tons of files in folders on my desktop, but the shutdown times are normal, now.

2> Use decent drivers

Thanks for saying "decent" instead of "latest".  For a good example of why, try a recent release of nVidia's Detonator drivers.  Boy, have they ever screwed up big-time on the FX drivers.  Almost everybody I know uses the older 45.23 WHQL drivers.  The newest drivers are designed to boost performace to keep up with ATI, but only give me frequent BSOD's.

I think that was the first time I ever downgraded drivers to make my system stable.  Lots of people are complaining about it.

3> Set up Windows properly and minimally

It really annoys me that Microsoft removed MSConfig in Windows2000 (but put it back into WinXP).  I use AppPaths to keep Windows clean.

App Paths

Beware, the site uses page transitions, a feature no web browser should ever support.

4> Don't install crap

Hoo, you should have seen my Aunt's computer, which I fixed over the holiday season.  It had at least four spamware programs installed on it which continuously plastered the screen with pop-ups even when IE was not running.  Even worse, it was a Win98 system upgraded to Win2K, and ran off two hard drives, so it had files all over the place, and had only 50Megs free on the boot drive.  I wanted to re-install it, but only had an hour to work on it.  That was the most cluttered machine I'd ever seen.  I'm surprised it even boot!

It's been years since I've seen any of my systems not shut down properly, so I simply won't believe anyone who says they do all of the above and still gets problems.

Oh, I've seen everything go wrong, even with top-flite hardware and meticulous care.  Some Windows machines just won't shut down.  Obviously, if you have a system that *consistently* takes forever to shut down, there's a problem.  But it's "normal" for a Windows system to lock up on shutdown once in a while.

Sure Windows is crap lots of times, but it does have it good points.

Thanks for saying what needs to be said.  I've always felt Microsoft does a good job supporting their products, even if they don't get it right the first time.