---
title: "Empty your recycle bin to shutdown faster"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/3/18/empty-your-recycle-bin-to-shutdown-faster.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/3/18/empty-your-recycle-bin-to-shutdown-faster.html"
published: "2003-03-18T07:24:00"
updated: "2003-03-18T07:24:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "The incomparable Ian Griffiths wrote on the WinTech Off Topic mailing list today: When I try to shut down, reboot, suspend, or hibernate my laptop, it sits and thrashes, often for minutes, before giving me the \"Turn Off…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Empty your recycle bin to shutdown faster

By Roy Osherove March 18, 2003

**Historical article** · Originally published March 18, 2003; technical details may be outdated.

_The incomparable_ [_Ian Griffiths_](https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596003382/qid=1047953999/sr=8-8/ref=sr_8_8/102-3270984-0097702?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) _wrote on the_ [_WinTech Off Topic_](http://groups.yahoo.com/group/win_tech_off_topic/message/16193) _mailing list today:_

> _When I try to shut down, reboot, suspend, or hibernate my laptop, it sits and thrashes, often for minutes, before giving me the "Turn Off Computer" window. (I'm running Windows XP Pro, and I'm referring to the window that pops up when you do Start Menu -> Turn Off Computer.)...It turns out that the thing that was causing the thrashing pre shutdown was that Windows was scanning my whole recycling bin before showing me the window. I'm not quite sure why - I guess there are certain events that cause it to go and check that the recycle bin isn't occupying more space than it should, and shutdown is one of those._

_I've often noticed a considerable delay between picking "Shut down" off the menu and actually seeing the damn menu appear. Really annoying. So today I tried emptying my Recycle Bin, and sure enough, the response became almost instantaneous. Sweet!_

\[via [CraigBlog](http://groups.yahoo.com/group/win_tech_off_topic/message/16193)\]

Great advice!


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

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### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/