I am a novice Xubuntu user on a dual-boot machine. The other OS I have is Windows 7.

When I first began using Xubuntu, I had really fast startup and shutdown (much much faster than Windows 7 :) ).

However, as I started using it more and more for my work, these times started rising. I do not have any problems with execution speed of running applications. My main concern is the shutdown time. Now it has gone above Windows shutdown time [startup time has only partially increase compared to shutdown].

I checked some similar questions like this. However, they seem to not answer my concern as I feel that the concerned users there experience a long wait before the screen goes blue.

In my case, the screen goes blue (desktop session ends a blue screen with a moving slider appears) pretty fast. However, it remains blue for a long time.

Another answer that I saw on google was to use dmesg and then stopping some services that I do not want. However, me being a novice could not completely understand what it meant