Automatically turn off or restart a Windows PC

Posted on November 15, 2008 at 5:45 am

Do you always leave your computer turned on and wished you have turned it off instead? For some users, the reasons are diverse from saving power consumption to just having a clocked or scheduled mechanism to shutdown or restart their computer.

Earlier I wrote about free command line tool called NirCmd that lets you create scripts to perform tasks on your computer, like shutting down the computer, opening the CD drive, etc and I wrote how you can schedule it to run using Task Manager to automatically turn off your computer at a specified time. However, that requires a bit of work and is pretty technical.

From http://www.mfshut.de/ comes a free software where you can set a countdown timer to execute a designated command like shutdown or restart. The MF Shutdown Manager’s screen is relatively simple and takes only two steps to set a shutdown timer as shown below:

After setting the time, click the Set Timer button on the lower part of the screen to start the countdown:

The green bars get shorter as time reaches the 00:00:00. The Stop Timer lets you stop the countdown so it provides a way for you to disengage the timer during countdown.
The other options are helpful if you need more control:

The extra tasks are very useful for clearing out historical data like temp files and browsing history. If you want to clear an object, just check them all and press the OK:

A subtle feature from this option window called “Silent mode” lets you hide the displaying of the process during the scheduled event. This is handy if you don’t want your seat mate to see that you cleared the cache. In a sense, this provides security by hiding information.

Not only shutdown events are executable but also WakeUp events:

If you enabled this feature, you can set up tasks like opening a monitor (if in sleep mode), play a custom WAV alarm, and launch a file (any file). If you launch an MP3 file, it will play that MP3 using your default MP3 player. This functionality is very handy for files that you want to be opened instantly but takes a while to load. This way the waiting time is decreased since it opens the launched file right during WakeUp:

Overall, if you are the type who likes to add more control to shutdown and startup events in Windows then this could be a perfect fit for you. This utility will also prevent you from leaving your computer turned on if you are too tired or not physically available to shut it down. It offers more than just brute shutdown and restart. It could clear caches and launch files. So if you need this functionality in your computer, give it a try!

Ben Carigtan jumps in and blogs!

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2 Responses to “Automatically turn off or restart a Windows PC”

Shutdown manager : Automatic restart, hibernate, log off computer Says:

[...] is a very good software which works for Windows Vista and Xp both Give Shutdown Manager a try ( Via Online tech Tips [...]
November 16th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Automatically turn off Windows computers on your network Says:

[...] MS Shutdown Manager is another free program that can shutdown computers automatically, but only using a timer countdown. You can either shutdown the computer at a specified date or time or after a specified period of time. [...]
December 15th, 2008 at 5:48 am