Windows 8 Won't Shutdown

One of my friends purchased a Windows 8 computer and complained to me that no matter what they do the machine will not shutdown through use of the Start Portal, Task Manager or even using the shutdown command from command prompt such as:

shutdown.exe -s -f

After some research it turns out that the issue was caused by the Windows 8 new dynamic ticking feature.  This feature is aimed at helping you increase your devices battery life by varying the speed of your device's processor based on its workload.  For some reason this feature on this computer prevented shutdown all together.

The fix was to use BCDEdit to disable the BCDEdit feature using the following command from an elevated command prompt.

bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes

During my research I also saw complaints about the dynamic ticking feature causing Windows 8 to crash and freeze with older processors and older mainboards.  For more information about these problems other people have had please refer to following blog post:

http://www.oscarcao.com/blog/2012/08/21/fix-for-windows-8-hanging-and-freezing