Windows 10 laptop taking longer and longer to shutdown?

Jon_01

Can anyone suggest what's causing this?

W10 updated about a week ago. Since then the shutdown has been getting longer every day. On Saturday it took 5 minutes to power off, last night it took 20 minutes before it finally went silent!

It shuts the screen down within a few seconds and then 'something' keeps running, the fans keep going and the lights stay on.

I haven't installed anything new in months. Nothing (apart from W10) has alerted that it's updated.  So I'm stumped as to what's going on??

This was a clean install of W10 about 8 weeks ago. The laptop is a Dell G7 and I haven't run the Dell update app in a month or more.

Can anyone suggest what might be the problem?

Thanks. . .

CoastingHatbox

The first thing I would do, is check the Windows Application, Setup and System Event logs for the time period between issuing the shutdown command and the machine finally powering off.

I'm no where near confident that will turn up the problem, but it is the easiest place to look.

Hit the Windows key
Search eventvwr.exe from the start menu and right-click the shortcut to open the context menu
Click 'Run As Administrator' on the context menu
Click through the UAC prompts if you have them turned on
In the left hand pane of Event Viewer expand Windows Logs. Under that node are the Application, Setup and System logs.

The next steps are running a Windows Shutdown trace (https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/37908.windows-event-tracing-how-to-collect-a-shutdown-trace.aspx) or capturing all the shutdown process activity with Process Monitor (https://live.sysinternals.com/procmon.exe). These, expecially the latter, can be quite involved so lets hope the event log turns something up.

Jon_01

CoastingHatbox said:

The first thing I would do, is check the Windows Application, Setup and System Event logs for the time period between issuing the shutdown command and the machine finally powering off.

I'm no where near confident that will turn up the problem, but it is the easiest place to look.

Hit the Windows key
Search eventvwr.exe from the start menu and right-click the shortcut to open the context menu
Click 'Run As Administrator' on the context menu
Click through the UAC prompts if you have them turned on
In the left hand pane of Event Viewer expand Windows Logs. Under that node are the Application, Setup and System logs.

The next steps are running a Windows Shutdown trace (https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/37908.windows-event-tracing-how-to-collect-a-shutdown-trace.aspx) or capturing all the shutdown process activity with Process Monitor (https://live.sysinternals.com/procmon.exe). These, expecially the latter, can be quite involved so lets hope the event log turns something up.

Thanks for that.  I've run eventvwr.exe and have the info below, but apart from the warning about usb removal (no usb device was removed), it's not much help.
I'm guessing that the Info line at 21:38:31 is the shutdown request, but the timings are off. It implies the process took just under 1 minute, while it really took closer to 20 before the fans and the light effects finally switched off...

Warning    01/11/2021 21:39:22    Kernel-PnP    225    (223)
Warning    01/11/2021 21:39:17    USB-USBHUB3    196    Surprise Removal
Warning    01/11/2021 21:39:17    USB-USBHUB3    196    Surprise Removal
Warning    01/11/2021 21:39:17    USB-USBHUB3    196    Surprise Removal
Warning    01/11/2021 21:39:17    USB-USBHUB3    196    Surprise Removal
Warning    01/11/2021 21:39:17    USB-USBHUB3    196    Surprise Removal
Information    01/11/2021 21:38:31    Kernel-Power    506    (157)
Information    01/11/2021 21:38:31    Kernel-Power    507    (158)
Warning    01/11/2021 21:38:31    Win32k (Win32k)    700    None
Warning    01/11/2021 21:38:31    Win32k (Win32k)    700    None

J_B

Clutching at straws .... have you tried to reboot instead?

CoastingHatbox

I noticed that ')' gets included as part of the event tracing hyperlink above, which results in social.technet.microsoft.com redirecting to a login page!

So here is the link without it:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/37908.windows-event-tracing-how-to-collect-a-shutdown-trace.aspx

At this point I would collect an shutdown event trace and see what is going on.

What model of laptop is it?
Please could you retrieve a list of the Windows Updates applied in the last few weeks?

In PowerShell ( start -> type powershell -> right-click icon and run as administrator) you can paste the following command:

Get-Hotfix | Where-Object { $_.InstalledOn -ge (Get-Date).AddDays(-30) } | Sort-Object -Property InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -Property HotFixId,InstalledOn

It might be worth checking that the machine is running all the latest drivers via the Dell update utility.

grumpycrab

J_B said:

Clutching at straws .... have you tried to reboot instead?

and hibernate (an alternative to shutdown just to see how long it takes)

GDB2222

If all else fails, try Google and the title of this thread. That brings up this for example 

https://appuals.com/windows-10-takes-forever-to-shutdown/

CoastingHatbox

GDB2222 said:

If all else fails, try Google and the title of this thread. That brings up this for example 

https://appuals.com/windows-10-takes-forever-to-shutdown/

Personally, I wouldn't make any registry changes or jump into trying random Internet-recommended solutions until I had a clearer idea about the behaviour and root cause* of the problem.

It is all too easy cause new problems or find oneself solving the problem almost by accident having made several changes, without really knowing which change fixed it. In the process, it is possible to break other things or find in future something else has broken instead, but you are left with an OS which is now somewhat unique which could make the new problem somewhat unique.

I think it is much better to try and keep an OS, as much as possible, in a "known state" where the changes applied to it, to make it "work", are kept to a bare minimum.

*In this case, I have a suspicion it might not be the OS at all at fault and for some reason the laptop's firmware is delaying the final shutdown after the OS triggers the ACPI shutdown event.

Jon_01

Thanks everyone for the info and advice.
I've performed a restore back to before the last W10 update and now shutdown takes less than a minute. 

There are no new drivers showing on both Windows update or the Dell support program.

I've stopped it re-updating for now, but I'll try again over the weekend and see if the problem comes back...