Create a Windows Shutdown Button

One of my favorite Windows tweaks involves the creation of a windows shutdown button. It's one button you can click to shutdown your workspace ASAP. Besides being a dead simple shutdown - it's dead simple to setup.

Here's how it works:

1. Right Click your desktop and select 'New -> Shortcut'
2. When the 'Create Shortcut' dialog appears type "shutdown -s -t 0"
3. You'll then be asked to name the shortcut, "Shutdown" should work nicely. This finishes the Create Shortcut dialog.

At this point you can customize the the icon by right clicking on it. If you choose 'Change Icon...' you can assign the shutdown icon to it and under 'Shortcut key' you can assign a key combination for triggering it. As you can see in the image above I then add it to my task bar for easy access.

What's it Mean?

Shutdown.exe handles shutting down the PC, restarting the PC, and a few other neat things. The '-s' indicates the shutdown while the '-t 0' indicates the time frame (in this case 0 seconds.) Depending on what you want to do you can also restart or logoff in the same way. 'shutdown -l -t 0' would logoff the current user while 'shutdown -r -t 0' would restart the machine.

For more on the shutdown command check out this entry at the Microsoft Windows XP command line reference documentation.