Shut Down Windows Quickly
Theoretically, when you shut down Windows, your computer should be
powered down in less than 15 seconds. The problem is that all of the
cleanup Windows tries to do before it considers it ???safe??? to power the system
down can sometimes cause delays. This includes shutting down your
open applications, stopping any running services, and writing any pending
cache data to the disk.
During the course of using your computer, Windows sometimes
postpones writing data to the disk to improve performance.
This is called write caching, and as a consequence,
Windows must take a few seconds before you shut down to
make sure all data queued to be written is actually, physically
written to the disk before power is lost. See the discussion
of removable drives in Chapter 6 for a way to disable
this feature.
Of course, the most effective way to speed up shutdown is to not shut down
at all. Rather, put your PC to sleep, as described in ???Start Windows
Instantly (Almost),??? earlier in this chapter. That way, you won??™t have to
close your documents, bookmark open web pages, or even quit your games;
they??™ll all still be where you left them when you wake up and resume your
previous session.
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Performance
Of course, it??™s good for Vista to shut down completely from time to time. If
you sleep your PC exclusively, it may mean you??™ll be operating under the
same Windows session for weeks or even months, and that can cause Windows
to slow down and become even more unreliable.
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