Some time ago I published a tip for forcing Windows to shutdown quickly, without worrying about exiting running programs and the other behind the scenes goings on that can make shutting down Windows XP a long and tedious business, and that’s without having to contend with unresponsive programs. Well, here’s another one, this time using a command entered in Run on the Start menu.
The command in question is shutdown.exe, and just by typing ‘shutdown -s’ will start the normal shutdown process, but we can beef it up a bit by adding some command line ‘switches’. These are extra instructions that tell it to do things in a certain way. Putting –f after the shutdown command, for example, tell it to force the shutdown, closing running applications without any warning.
Here’s another one, adding –t xx tells your PC to wait a specified amount of time (xx represents time in seconds), before shutting down.
So here is an example command, and feel free to modify the switches and time delay to suit your way of working: ‘shutdown –f –s –t 3’.
If you want to experiment here’s some other switches. –r restarts the computer, -c “text” lets you add a comment to the shutdown dialogue box (up to 127 characters) –l tells Windows to you to logoff the user.
Posted in: windows
