Those sounds just went through my head. That noise hurts just to think about.

but I also don't know the last time I had to wait 5-10 minutes for a computer to shut down.

Windows 7 seems to take 5 minutes to shut down, even if I give it a head-start by explicitly closing all applications I can see or understand.

There are 137 "processes" and over 200 "services" running right now on the Windows 7 machine I am at. I can't watch them go away when I shut down, because if I leave the task manager running, Windows 7 complains about the Task Manager still running when I want to shut down.

There are many things that are much better today, but it seems that some things are getting worse.