Desktop won't turn off
 

My laptop is going into the shop so I fired up my desktop to use for awhile. Its an HP Pavilion that is maybe 6 years old. After running a bunch of updates I needed to restart to finish them up. The problem is the dumb thing won't turn off or restart. The only way to shut it down is to hold the power button in.

Anyone have any ideas?

If it's not shutting down with the software command, there is something in the memory that is hanging and not properly shutting down to let it continue the shutdown process. I bet if you tried shutting down after booting up in shutdown it'd shutdown fine.
If this is consistent open your task manager and see all running processes, take note of them to see if any seem odd or out of place. Open msconfig and go through your startup items, uncheck all of them, restart, try to restart again, it should work. If it doesn't move on to services. If it does, start enabling the startup items in msconfig one by one and restart twice (once to enable it to startup, once to see if it hangs) until it hangs again. Troubleshoot, remove, or reinstall that program.

Long process, but the only real way to figure out what's making it hang.

Also, I assume you're running windows. If you're running Mac OS or Linux let me know, I can help on either.

Same thing happened to my desktop out of the blue as well.

I tried every thing (including adjusting the power settings, updating BIOS, hash check, etc etc).. Only thing that solved it was doing a fresh install of Windows.

Arghhhh! Thanks. I hate computers sometimes. I just want my stuff to work.

Too much porn... A 6 year old PC desktop is essentially obsolete. I wouldn't put any money into it. Try the free version of CCleaner by Piraform. It helped me get an old laptop going for one of my firends kids. After scanning for problems run the registry cleaner until it has no more errors found. Might help, might not. Good luck..

Just a helpful hint for what I do to make things quick and painless when it comes to computer issues.
I only have a small partition for the OS, about 20GB. I have another for all my storage. The storage partition is where I install everything to and save everything to, pictures, music, games, apps, etc. If something weird happens and you have to reinstall, you just wipe the OS, start again, nothing is lost. You may have to reinstall programs to get all the system files and registry entries in there, but your info will be saved.

BTW: I run Linux and typically do a fresh install about once every 6 months when a new distribution is released, so this helps out a lot.