SKIRMISHER

When Windows 95 was just coming out, we licked our lips at the thought that this was a Windows breed that would be much faster than its predecessors. The tech gossip in my little community in those days usually consisted of trivial things, like how the OS supposedly boots up and shuts down “in a zap.” Many generations of Windows later, I know how wrong we were.

I’m currently using Windows XP in all my machines, and booting up is usually a terrible game of waiting; I’d usually flick on the PC’s switch first, proceed to my morning ablutions, make coffee, and come back more than a dozen minutes later to find the machine just in the process of uploading the last pieces of system software.

And shutting down is the same, too. IntelliAdmin’s Steve Wiseman says that the answer lies in the problems inherent in unloading the current user’s profile. According to him, the waiting game happens:

“…when third party, or even Microsoft applications have not properly cleaned up when exiting. Windows will keep trying to unload the profile until Windows finally decides that it can’t and should shutdown. Even if you find the application causing the problem - it may be impossible to do anything about it.”

The solution to the goddamn business is Microsoft’s own User Profile Hive Cleanup Service.

This piece of code frees up memory and resources whenever a task is finished. I installed it and yeah, things seem faster now, although my laptop froze the first time it went running. My desktop machine seems fine, though, and it now shuts down not in icy eons but in mere seconds.

Click here to see the original IntelliAdmin write-up.

Stumble it!