Windows Vista Vista Shuts Down too Quickly

A minor problem but an annoying one: when my Vista Home Premium is shutting down it doesn't give me time to save open files such as Word, Excel, and such. It opens the dialog box to ask to save, don't save, or cancel but I barely start reaching for my mouse and it shuts down the program moves on to the next thing. Later when I open my files in the next session have to tell it which version I want to save. Or it saves something I don't need to.

How can I adjust this so that it at least waits for 10 or 20 seconds so that I can save or not? Or, as a second choice, make it hang in the process until I instruct it what to do?

 

From what I understand there's basically 2 things that affect this:
- csrss.exe
- the SCM (services.exe)

csrss.exe's timeout is defaulted to 20 seconds and resides in HKU\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\WaitToKillAppTimeout (FYI - my Vista installation doesn't have this value)

The SCM's timeout also defaults to 20 seconds and it resides in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WaitToKillServiceTimeout (FYI - my Vista installation has this key as a Reg_sz value with a data field of 20000

I think it's most likely that the SCM has be set to some other value, but would recommend checking both locations. If you find something amiss, BACKUP your registry before making any changes!

Good luck!

 

I'm usually good at save stuff as I go along, but hey, sometimes I forget, usually when doing an update reboot for something. Thanks for the info, I'll check csrss.exe and the SCM.

 

Have you tried using the Sleep function.? Vista is geared to sleep rather than shut down.

And that way, you won't need to save your work, it will still be there when you wake it up.

Try reading about Sleep in Help and Support. As far as energy saving goes, it should be little different to shutting down and it should save waiting for startup.

I always shut down in Win XP, in Vista, I now only shut down for maintenance or restart occasionally.

Matt

 

Thanks!