Here’s a simple little tip to help shut down Windows quicker. Recently I was help speed up a Vista laptop and after all was repaired and cleaned up it still took ages to shut down. This was basically because Windows was waiting for various services to stop.

To speed this up you’ll need to modify the registry, Click Start  and type Regedit in the Search box, then start the Program.

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Once that’s open you’ll need to drill down to the following key location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

With Control highlighted on the left column, on the right-hand side you should see an object called WaitToKillServiceTimeout, with a value of 20000.
20000 represents milliseconds, or 20 seconds to you and me. Double click on this and you can change this value to whatever you require, 5000 = 5 seconds is ok. I wouldn’t go much lower than that.

And that’s it, Windows should now shut down quicker.
Hope this helps you out of a sticky quibble.