I've noticed that when the exit windows and start windows sound is enabled ... the system takes a lot of time to boot or shutdown. You can disable these annoying sounds from your control panel -->Sounds and Audio Devices -> Sounds ... and make your system boot and shutdown faster.

Yup, it's true. If you have Windows set to play a sound when you shut down, it will wait for the entire sound clip to play through before shutting down ... which can sometimes be a pain.

Nice! Didn't know about that one.

but how....how do u disable it

Hi there,

As nanosani said, you go to Control Panel and click on Sounds and Audio Devices. There you go to the Sounds tab (2nd one on top) and look at the list labled Program Events then find & click on Exit Windows. Right below the "Program Events" list there's a drop-down list labled Sounds, open it and all the way up you'll see (None). Choose that and then Apply and you're done

BTW, cool tip nanosani .. this is usually an overlooked and simple method to increase preformance (even if slightly)


Ciao for now.

You can hibernate the PC. It's real fast

My PC takes an eternity to boot but not because of any sound.
It's the plethora of USB hardware I've installed, all of which needs to be powered up and initialised that causes the 5+ minute bootcycle...

five minutes !!!!

cripes ... I'd have thrown some of that stuff out long ago if mine took that long. Are you able to remove any from the start process? If I hit the 'restart' button, it takes 40 seconds before I'm back at a usable desktop.

A lot of 'tweak' sites advise that you can clear the page file at every reboot (or shutdown to be more specific), as a security measure in the registry. This setting for the ultra paranoid. What they don't mention is how much time it will add to the system shutting down

It's all hardware related (apart from my AV, firewall, mail- and webservers).

With 4 harddrives, a DVD burner, and a dozen USB devices, it just takes time for all that to power up and have their drivers loaded.
After that it's mainly the DSL which takes a while to come up, which delays the startup cycle of my mailserver and firewall.

Awesome guys thanks alot.