At the office I run a single Windows 2003 server which also runs Exchange 2003. It has a fat amount of RAM and 4x large SATA disks. Everything else the business needs - a number of Linux servers - run as VM Ware virtual machines on the server.

Anyhoo, it takes the machine 20 minutes to reboot and this is simply not satisfactory especially bearing in mind that I need to perform some open heart surgery on it in the very near future because I need to rename the domain and simply can’t be arsed to do a fresh install.

A quick bit of googling came up with this link the contents of which can be summarised thus:

Fire up regedit and change the following:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Control\WaitToKillServiceTimeout: 1000

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks: 1
HKEY_USERS\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks: 1

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\HungAppTimeout: 1000
HKEY_USERS\Control Panel\Desktop\HungAppTimeout: 1000

KEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WaitToKillAppTimeout: 1000
KEY_USERS\Control Panel\Desktop\WaitToKillAppTimeout: 1000

and to make start-up a bit faster:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher: 3

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\ BootOptimizeFunction: N (to disable).

It now takes about 1 min less to start up and has gone from 20 mins to about 30 secs to shut-down.