Welcome again my friends 
All of us sometimes have difficulties shutting down the PC and are forced to use the “Power” hardware button to turn off our systems. Not any more…MasterGenius.NET will show you a way to amazingly easy turn off or restart your PC at a specific time and even better using shortcuts. You will also be able to cancel a shutdown or restart you accidentally caused anytime for any reason.
Firstly: We will use the process “shutdown.exe” which is built in on every windows system into this directory “C:/WINDOWS/System32/shutdown.exe” where as the c: is the drive where you have windows installed 
1) Create a shortcut for shutting down the system with or without time specified
- Right click on desktop and make a new shortcut.
- Then it will ask for the location of the item and you must type in the following “c:/windows/system32/shutdown.exe -s -t 15″ without the quotes.
- Explanation now Please
- shutdown.exe: is the name of the program we call to shutdown the system or restart it
- -s: tells the system that we want it to shutdown and not restart
- -t: specifies that we will enter a time to shutdown the pc and then follows the time in seconds “15″ in our case
This is the basic arguments you pass to this program for it to work. If you want the PC to instantly shutdown you just add the “-s” argument after the shutdown.exe.
Now to make it a little more spicy we want to make it even faster. When we are going to run this shortcut we want it to shutdown the pc without interuption so we must add this argument “-f” too in order to close all running applications without asking us. And the whole command should be this way “C:/windows/system32/shutdown.exe -s -f -t 15″ , this will shutdown the PC in 15 seconds and force all running applications to close.
2) Create a shortcut for restarting the system with or without time specified
To restart the PC instead of shutting it down we must use the argument “-r” instead of the “-s” we used in shutdown. So for more clear information if you want to restart the system in 23 seconds and want to close all applications even not responding ones we must use this “c:/windows/system32/shutdown.exe -r -f -t 23″ into the location box in the shortcut.
3) Cancel all processes made with the shutdown.exe
Now let’s say you have by mistake clicked on one of your above shortcuts but you DON’T want the system to restart or shutdown. There is another command you can use to cancel all running scheduled restarts or shutdowns with the shutdown.exe program.
- Create a new shortcut and in the location box write “c:/windows/system32/shutdown.exe -a” without quotes
the “-a” arguments clears all the others called before and the system does not reboot or shutdown.
In conclusion the 3 shortcuts we learned today are:
- shutdown.exe -s -f -t 15 (shutdown the pc and force to close all applications in 15 seconds)
- shutdown.exe -r -f -t 12 (restart the pc and force all applications to close in 12 seconds)
- shutdown.exe -a (CANCEL all the above, must be run before the time specified has passed for obvious reasons )
If you do not want to create shortcuts and have them on your desktop you can memorize them and type them into “RUN dialog box in WindowsXP” or into the “Searchbar at the bottom of start menu in windows VISTA” and will work the same way.
ATTENTION: In case the commands do not work there must be problem with the “shutdown.exe” by default located in “x:/windows/system32/” folder where x: is the drive where windows is installed. If for any reason you don’t have this program in there you can download it from below and place it where ever you want and use it from there. But be careful to use the new location into the shortcuts.
***For more detailed information on the “shutdown.exe” program open the CommandPrompt into your system and type “shutdown help” without the quotes!!!
UPDATE: I forgot to tell you tha you can use the “shutdown -a” command to cancel any shutdown your system is doing. For example sometimes because of an error your pc tells you tha it will turn off in 10 seconds. You can use this command to cancel these turnoffs too, not just the ones you start.
I hope you liked the small tutorial and be useful for you all
