The program is called Absolute Shutdown and lets the user set the amount of seconds Windows should wait before killing a process or service. When run for the first time it displays the current settings before Windows kills an application or service. This is usually set to a large amount and can normally be reduced without facing difficulties.

The wait time before windows would kill an application was set to 20 seconds and for hung applications to 35 seconds. I told him to reduce this setting to two seconds which should be more than enough and quit every important application before shutting down the computer. You can reduce this even further if you do not experience problems with this setting.

The settings become valid after restarting your computer. What can I say, he told me that his computer is now shutting down a lot faster than before. The software can be run from any location without installing it first. I suggest you keep it for a while to see if the new settings are not interfering with important processes or services on your computer.

If you do experience problems you should increase the shutdown timeout again to counter this. Users who do not want to use a program can change the shutdown timeouts in the Registry.

The first two settings can be found in the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. They are called HungAppTimeout and WaitToKillAppTimeout. You should also set the key AutoEndTasks to 1 if it is not set to this value already.

The timeout settings for Services can be found in the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control and is called WaitToKillServiceTimeout. The value is entered in miliseconds which means that the value 2000 should be entered if you want to set this to 2 seconds each.

The shutdown is almost immediate which means it is much faster than the shutdown with the usual registry tweaks that can be applied to reduce the timeout delay for processes. The freeware runs fine on Windows Vista and XP, you should just be aware that Superfast Shutdown ignores everything that is still open and running. This could mean that you loose data that has not been saved. Make sure you save everything important before you activate the shutdown option.

Installing the freeware adds two shortcuts to your desktop. The first is called superfast shutdown and the second superfast reboot. Both options are great if you think that the normal shutdown and reboot procedure takes to long. Again, make sure that everything important is saved before you click on the shortcuts.