why do my two identical systems take diff amounts of time to shut down?

[flood]

Theyre more or less identical - different brand of hard drives(same size), and different power supplies.

2x 366@550
abit bp6
matrox millenium
3.2 gig hd (one is ibm, the other is wd)
netgear fa311

both have a fresh win2k install, and the bios settings are identical.
one takes about 20sec more to shut down than the other.

what could cause this?

 

[MrHelpful]

Maybe the hard drives have a different rotational speed, less cache, maybe the slower one shares a channel with the CD devices, etc.

 

[Kill_Phil]

i would have to agree with mrhelpful, one is likely faster than the other, hd is the main bottleneck in pc's, greatly affects boot time

 

[flood]

i dont think its the hard drives...
the one that takes longer just sits there doing nothing for those ~20sec.
both drives are ata/33 and 5400rpm and are by themselves on the channel. heck, theyre the only drives on the computer

 

[SocrPlyr]

i would have to go w/ the hd thing... winNT based OSes write a lot to the hd while shutting down... whereas win9x basically throws everythign out the window... hehe
sry i couldn't add to much to the equation tho...

Josh

 

[pjs]

If the hardware in the two systems is identical (with the exception of the hard drives), then swapping the hard drives between the two systems will give some additional insight.

If the slow shutdown moves with the hard drive, then the cause is the hard drive or something in the w2k install/setup on the hard drive. If the slow shutdown does not move, then it is a hardware or bios (motherboard, video board, network card, etc.) related.

If you had a third hard drive to experiment with, you could clone (or ghost) the contents of one hard drive to the third and install the third and see what happens. Then cloning the other hard drive to this third one and again seeing what happens will give additonal insights. Of course, you could forget about a third drive and just clone the fast shutdown drive to the slow one and see what happens, assuming that you do not mind losing the software/setup that is unique to the cloned-to drive prior to cloning.

If they are both networked together, try disconnecting BOTH from the nework (remove the network cable from each network card and restart both systems. When they are back up, then shut down each one and time them. It may be that the difference in shutdown time could be due to networking issues at shutdown.

Paul