System Won’t ShutDown
March 20, 2009 5:05 pm Basic Skills, Information, Tips
This may be an indicator that a hidden application may have hung up, preventing the shutdown code from executing. This can result in a non-shutdown scenario so press, CTRL-ALT-DEL to get at the task manager to see which erring application has stopped responding so you could shut it down manually. Should you fail to find it or the system may have stopped responding all together, you may have to do a reboot through the reset button on your front panel but allow the system to restart and complete the diagnostic phase. After the system has restored proper boot-up, then you can shut down and leave it be. If the condition recurs, then something else may be wrong, say a hard drive that is about to fail or a weak BIOS battery may be resetting the bios settings while you are using it so get it checked to be sure.
There may even be an issue with a device you have connected such as a thumb drive or other peripheral that encountered an error, making the system unstable enough preventing the shutdown process from proceeding. You can diagnose the problem by elimination, checking the system for any erroneous programs or worse, you may have avirus doing something nasty in the background, way out of sight (check the hard drive and network connection indicator) any abnormal activity may have some form of malware dong it’s thing behind your back!