Making Windows Server 2003 suck less when rebooting

March 7, 2007 by bealers

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.

Darren (a.k.a. Bealers by his friends) has been a professional web developer for longer than he'd care to admit and currently runs Siftware. It's not all geekdom, though. When not in front of a computer he enjoys woodworking, the odd bit of windsurfing and spending as much time as possible with his wife and 3 kids. He also tweets as @bealers and hates writing in the third person.


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