Registry Clean and Repair

There are two main ways to speed up XP shutdown time. One requires manually editing the registry, the other is much simpler.

Registry Edit

Be warned, if you’ve never edited your registry before then you should know that one wrong move and you may not be able to restart your PC successfully!

OK, this works because as your PC gets older and takes longer to shut down, it’s due to XP trying to check that all open programs (even the ones you cannot see!) have been successfully closed individually.

But by hacking the registry, you can tell XP to not bother checking. Here are the steps:

1. Go to Start, Run, regedit
2. Find the key: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop”
3. Double-click “AutoEndTasks”
4. Change the value of this to “1″

A Much Quicker Way

This method is quicker although if you like to use this quick shutdown often then you may prefer to do the registry hack instead.

When you want to shut down, simply:

1. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to launch Task Manager
2. Click the “Shut Down” menu and hover your mouse over the sub-menu “Turn Off”
3. While holding down the Ctrl key, click “Turn Off”

This has the same effect but you must follow this process each time.

If you’re interested in more ways to enhance the performance of your PC then you may also be interested in the following site articles of ours: Registry Hacks To Speed Up XP, XP Performance Tuning, Windows XP Performance Tweaks.