Had XP (Home Edition) about a month now and very happy. But after I click on Start>Turn Off Computer>Turn Off it takes ages (as much as a minute) to actually turn off. I get the message on the screen that the system is shutting down etc; but it takes a long time to physically shut down. I just wondered how long other people wait for their PC to completely turn off. I have a Athlon 1000; 2 hard drives (40gb and 20gb) about 10 gb in use; 512 Ram and a USB modem.

It depends on the state of the OS when I shut it down, if I have been using a lot of win 98, 95 orgrams and have had a few crashes Windows can take forever (up to 10mins). If I go in and just use, say office for example, shut down time can be 5-7 seconds.

A great improvement over W2K! Just the way it works -- needs to save settings, close programs and services. If you have a lot of hardware in your machine, icons on the toolbar, tweaks and customizations, and have just been running the machine for a long time, it's take a bit to shut down. Try holding down shift and StandBy will turn into Hibernate. Meant for laptops, but works well with desktops. This will give you a speedier bootup and shutdown as it saves all that "stuff" to a sort of swap file.

Downlaod XP AntiSpy and it will fix that problem! XP Antispy is freeware and u can find it on goolg ejust by searching. It fixed alot of other windows xp bugs and tweaks the registry. U get to to chose the options.

Eagle,, I just had the same problem last week and for me it was Zone alarm causing it, had to uninstall it completely! Dont know if you have ZA, but it just a thought!

Any type of firewall or AV will cause slow shutdowns and bootups

Thanks for your replies; the Zone Alarm and Virusguard definetly SLOWS it down when closing........I turned them both off before I shut down and it saved 30 seconds