Here is a great tweak that I used to use on XP but completely forgot about when I upgraded to Vista, it reduces the shutdown speed using WaitToKillServiceTimeout.

This setting in the registry allows you to specify a length of time that the service control manager must wait for services to complete the shut-down request before shutting down.

So if a value of 20,000 is set then your PC waits 20 seconds for your services to finish before shutting down. This is great to speed up shutdown just don’t go to crazy and try to make it too fast first go - and backup your registry.

  • Open regedit
  • Navigate to this location
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
  • Find this string - WaitToKillServiceTimeout
  • Right click and select modify
  • Now as I said earlier don’t put down 1000 first time, try using 10,000
  • Reboot and test it

You may want to try and reduce the value of WaitToKillServiceTimeout, but just do it by a 1000 at a time.