Users often complain to me when their computer takes a long time to start up. To some extent, diagnosing a slow startup is easy in comparison to diagnosing a slow shutdown. Users may not notice that their computer is having difficulty shutting down, or they may not know. Users often hit the Shut Down option and walk away from the computer. So what’s the harm in a slow shutdown? Often, a slow shutdown is symptomatic of a driver problem in Windows.

Diagnosing A Hung Driver At Shutdown

Windows (especially Vista) takes care of a lot of housekeeping at shutdown. Updates are typically installed before lights-out, so this can mask some shutdown problems. If your shutdown problems are persistent, or the computer seems to hesitate for a long time each time you shut down, you’re free to suspect a driver that’s gone bad.

To troubleshoot, you can take a quick inventory of your loaded drivers using msconfig. Scan the list of drivers. If you spot one or more that you know you don’t need, disable them or better yet, uninstall them. You’ll need to restart and shutdown to see if one of your orphan drivers is causing the problem. If you’re lucky, this should be the end of the Long Goodbye. Most often, you won’t be this lucky, but unloading unnecessary drivers is never a bad idea, so this exercise won’t be a total loss.

Once you’ve pruned out the drivers you will never need, examine the list of remaining drivers. Disable them, then restart and shut down the computer again. If your computer’s separation anxiety clears up, you know you’re dealing with a driver problem. Add drivers back into your configuration one at a time, restarting and shutting down until you find the driver that’s causing the problem.

If you do find the problematic driver, check with the manufacturer to see if there’s an update for it. If not, the driver has probably been corrupted and should be replaced with a fresh copy. As long as you’re updating things, make sure you have applied the latest security and OS updates.

If this isn’t really how you planned to spend a quiet evening at home, consider getting a software program that will monitor and manage your drivers. Driver Detective is the top driver management software. The program will detect corrupted, old and missing drivers and will download and install them for you. It’s a lot easier that “startup, configure, shutdown, repeat.” (Unless you like that sort of thing…)

Photo Credit: Kaushik Gopal, via Flickr