How to know what Windows 7 is doing before shutdown/reboot? [closed]

I have a core i3 notebook running Windows 7 32-bit, and sometimes it takes a long time to shutdown or reboot. I have disabled Windows Update, and have not installed any new software or drivers. So, there is no reason to take about 5 minutes to shutdown or reboot.

How can I determine what it is doing? BTW, I see the blinking light for hard disk activity during these time.

Actually, this can be enabled through Group Policy.

If you're running a Professional edition of Windows, the setting is found in the Group Policy Editor: Type gpedit.msc in the Start menu search box (or Cortana) and hit Enter, then go to Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → System and is called Verbose vs normal status messages for Windows 7 and earlier and Display highly detailed status messages for Windows 8 and later. Enable the setting to show verbose information while shutting down or starting up.

If you're running a Home version of Windows, open Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion‌​\Policies\System, and set the key verbosestatus to 1, creating it as a DWORD value if it does not exist.

(Credit for the specifics of this process goes to The Windows Club.)

Install the Windows Performance Toolkit, part of Windows 10 SDK (Build 15086, last version that works on Windows 7).

Run WPRUI.exe, select First Level, under Resource select CPU usage, DiskIO, FileIO and under Performance Scenario select Shutdown. Number of iteration can be set to 1

and click to start.

After reboot, open the ETL with WPA.exe. In WPA.exe, click on Profiles->Apply->"Browse Catalog" and select FullBoot.Shutdown.wpaprofile.

Now you see this overview how long shutdown takes:

In this sample it takes 8s to shutdown. 2s are needed to close the user session (were 1.2s were spend to kill onedrive.exe) and shutting down the windows kernel/services takes 5s.

Look at your data to see where Windows spends most of the time. If you see disk activity during shutdown, analyze the ETL for DiskIO and FileIO.