[danielweber]

The past was full of a lot more paging to disk and it was awful.

Those sounds just went through my head. That noise hurts just to think about.

but I also don't know the last time I had to wait 5-10 minutes for a computer to shut down.

Windows 7 seems to take 5 minutes to shut down, even if I give it a head-start by explicitly closing all applications I can see or understand.

There are 137 "processes" and over 200 "services" running right now on the Windows 7 machine I am at. I can't watch them go away when I shut down, because if I leave the task manager running, Windows 7 complains about the Task Manager still running when I want to shut down.

There are many things that are much better today, but it seems that some things are getting worse.

[anonymfus]

In theory you could install Windows Performance Toolkit from Windows SDK and then trace shutdown with xbootmgr command, then try to analyse resulting .etl file (xbootmgr will save it to the current folder) with xperf. In practice that will probably take more time than you could save by optimizing shutdown.

[varkson]

That sounds painful. Ever since I went to Win 8 my shutdown has been instant. Startup is around 3 seconds.