Reader Eric writes in with a tip to eliminate hangs and speed up the shutdown process in Windows without installing any extra software.
Whenever I tried to shutdown my work laptop it would take almost five minutes. Five minutes! Since I work in a completely locked-down environment I couldn’t look to any third party applications for help. Entering the following shutdown command in the run dialog speeds up my shutdown time dramatically.
shutdown -f -t 0
The command Eric uses immediately forces any open applications to close without warning prior to Windows shutting down. Here’s another way to quickly shutdown your Windows computer. Thanks, Eric!