


Some of the symptoms that may occur :

  1. Slow shutdown
  2. Shutdown seems to hang
  3. Computer reboots instead of shutdown

These problems often remain unsolved for several reasons. Most of the time it only slows you down, but you can still work on your computer. Most people don’t even try to solve it because they think it requires expert skills to fix Windows XP slow shutdown situations.

Don’t be like most people.


Your computer reboots rather than shutting down

A lot of computers with shutdown problems do this. It’s because Windows XP has a default setting to reboot the computer in the event of a system crash. When something goes wrong during the shutdown event, Windows may think that it crashed and restarts your computer.

First thing to do when this happens to your computer is configure Windows so that it doesn’t automatically restart after a critical failure :

  1. Click the start button, right-click “My Computer” and select properties
  2. Click the “advanced” tab
  3. In the “Startup and Recovery” section, click the “settings” button
  4. The “Startup and Recovery” dialog appears
  5. In the “System failure” section, deselect the “Automatically restart” checkbox
  6. Click ok
  7. Click ok

Auto reboot option


This workaround prevents your computer from rebooting during shutdown, but unfortunately it doesn’t take away the root cause of the failure. Here are some other steps that you can try to solve the underlying problem.

Hardware device drivers


  • Click the Start button
  • Right-click “My Computer” and select “Properties”
  • Click the “hardware” tab
  • In the “Device Manager” section, click the “Device Manager” button



Return from this windows xp slow shutdown tip to the general Windows XP shutdown page.

%d bloggers like this: