OT: Windows 10 Updates

You've just got it set to hibernate (or sleep, or a hybrid of the two) when the lid is shut, so it's just got to wake-up when you open it, pretty normal for a laptop.

I always power off my desktop when I have finished for the day, but I have noticed that Win10 takes utterly ages to shut down. The disk activity light is on while it is 'doing something', quite what I cannot imagine. I close all the applications and browsers so there is nothing to save to disk. What is it doing ?.

It also seems to send a shutdown signal to my monitor at the point when Win 7 would have shown a screen saver and forced a new user login when pressing a key or moving the mouse.

Apart from saving what is in the disk cache.

an update?

Its always been a settable option since well before Win7

Its probably set to one of the sleep modes. There is the standby, which means its always on, or there is the hibernate one which makes an image and puts it on the drive and then it can restore to where it started. My advice, should you decide to accept it, is to do an alt/f4 and see what it defaults to, and take the turn off one. It may be slower, but it is, in my opinion less likely to get cocked up. Brian

Yes well my main machine still runs 7, as its far more stable and not as likely to take ages to update and then trash legacy programs with no warning whatsoever. If they made 10 behave like 7 did through updates, I'd be there, but as it stands in my reality, its a real pain. Brian

I suspect that's "old thinking" Brian, mine's set to sleep on lid close, so it'll wake-up effectively instantly when the lid is opened again, and to have a hibernate file so that if battery gets low while it's in sleep mode, it can still carry-on where it left off when plugged in again, no need to choose between modes.

Power management might have been a bit dodgy up to and including the XP days, but now it generally works, I'm wondering why the O/P thinks there's anything wrong with his setup?

My laptop boots from totally off so quickly nowadays that I fail to see the need for sleep or hibernate at all. Not to mention that I rarely turn it off anyway, the screen is powered down after ten minutes idle and that's it.

Does it every day. I install updates 'manually' .

I went down a different route. My IT cousin persuaded me to install a solid state drive. Now the shutdown and startup are so fast there is no inconvenience at all in closing it down as oftern as I want..

make sure you back it up at least daily :-)

I asked him that. He says the modern SSDs are more reliable than mechanical drives. That said, I am quite paranoid about backing up.

Also, the data is on a mechanical drive anyway.

still under 1 second vs about 6 seconds, plus how long it takes to startup whatever apps you require.

powercfg /h off # then retest

This controls the existence of a hibernation file. You can turn it back on if you don't like the results.

You could also

dir C:\hiberfil.sys

and see what size it is. Since it's a hidden file, you might need

dir /ah C:\hiberfil.sys

dir /? # help, to see what attribs can be passed

The file (and its size) are a kind of "reservation". There is no need to write out the entire memory during S4 hibernation or S3 hybrid sleep. An idle desktop, with not a lot of programs open, should close up fairly quickly. When hibernation is not being used, just the header part of the file is overwritten, with size info. But the file stays it's normal big size, anyway. The space is reserved in case it's needed.

If you were really using all the RAM on the machine, the delay could be 8 minutes for some larger machines. This would make you think twice about hibernating, as you'd pay 8 minutes at shutdown, 8 minutes at startup.

I just turn off hibernation, knowing that for the benefits it brings, the cost could be high.

If an update is happening at shutdown, there are some "PendMoves" file operations that could happen, but those should also result in the juggling ball display. Perhaps no percentage progress number is shown during PendMoves, then as the update support operations continue, you'll see it say 30% or whatever.

If your Windows Update is jammed, check the History tab in Windows Update, to see if the same update is failing over and over again. In Control Panels

control.exe

there is a Troubleshooter, and in there is one for Windows Update. It doesn't always work that well, but I also see that the basic design of Windows 10 has evolved enough, it gives SoftwareDistribution folder a whack eventually (cleans some stuff out). Whether the Troubleshooter had something to do with that, it's hard to say.

Paul

C:\Users\Andrew>

C:\Users\Andrew>powercfg/h off Unable to perform operation. An unexpected error (0x65b) has occurred: Function failed during execution.

??????????????????

C:\Users\Andrew>dir /ah C:\hiberfil.sys Volume in drive C is WIN7 Volume Serial Number is 24A6-D9F8

Directory of C:\

C:\Users\Andrew>powercfg/list

Existing Power Schemes (* Active)

----------------------------------- Power Scheme GUID: 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e (Balanced) * Power Scheme GUID: 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c (High performance) Power Scheme GUID: a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a (Power saver)

The quarterly windows malicious software removal update gives an error and has done since February.

You need to open your CMD window with "run as admin"

That's not a large enough hibernation file to get excited about.

And if the disk itself had problems (could only read or write at 10MB/sec because it was sick), then every stage of operation would be slow.

It could be a Windows Update which is stuck in a loop, and it tries to run at every shutdown.

Would unwinding a pagefile do that ? The last time that was a problem was on Windows XP. That doesn't seem likely.

Process Monitor, is one of the cheapest ETW things you can run, to trace what the machine is doing. Windows has had a subsystem added, that certain calls the software makes, can be recorded, and you can look at the trace later, and gather valuable information such as "what registry keys was that program playing with" and "what files is it reading or writing".

But it has one additional capability. If Process Monitor is current tracing and capturing computer events, when a Boot Trace starts, the program will automatically save the Shutdown Trace for the currently running tracing exercise, as well as collecting a Boot Trace at the next startup. After waiting two minutes after the desktop appears, you run ProcMon.exe again, and it tidies up the Boot Trace and collects a file. Now, you should have two files waiting for you. It helps, to set the trace type to "record to file" before making it collect the shutdown trace, so you've provided a place to put the trace.

Then, you can review the Shutdown Trace as a separate file from the Boot Trace. You could set a filter for ReadFile, WriteFile, CreateFile, and see what files the computer was interested in during shutdown. The trace will end, before the computer has put all of its toys away, so we can't be sure exactly what it will capture and what it will miss.

But that's an example of what you do when you're getting desperate for an answer.

There are bigger packages such as WPA (Windows Performance Analyzer), but those are more for IT people with nothing better to do. (As the package is slow, and produces gobs of data for no reason I can discern. The guy who writes that software though, seems to enjoy himself.)

Paul