How to Shutdown Computer Automatically in Windows 7

Have you ever been in a situation where you forget to turn off your computer and your computer ended up overheated or any other related issues that may harm your computer (like you're running windows update on power supply without the battery and suddenly there's a power failure....?)

As for me, I always forgot to shutdown the computer at night. Mostly because I fell asleep watching movie on bed. And, usually I run my computer on power supply instead of using the battery so there were several times where the power outage occurred and my computer is still running. This is bad for any computers. So, one of the way to prevent that is by scheduling an automatic shutdown to turn off the computer at certain time.

In this tutorial, I'm gonna show you 2 methods of how to do it.

Method 1

1. Click the Start Menu button and type Task Scheduler.

2. Press Enter.
3. Click on the Task Scheduler Library > Create Basic Task.
4. At the 'Create a Basic Task' tab, put any name you prefer (ex: Shutdown) and click Next.
5. At the 'Trigger' tab, choose whichever you want. In this example, I'm going to choose Daily. Click Next.
6. Then, set the start date and time also the recurrence (or just leave it as 1). And, click Next.

7. At the Action tab, select the 'Start a Program' and click Next.

8. Type the following in the Program/script:

shutdown.exe -s -f

 

9. Click Next. Then, a message will prompt, just click Yes.
10. Click Finish. The task will be added to the Task Scheduler Library.
11. You can edit or delete the task by right-click on the selected task on the library list, and select Properties or Delete.

Note: The computer will automatically shutdown at the exact time (daily) that has been set regarding what activities/programs are running at that time (as they will be force to close).

Method 2

1. In Desktop, create a new shortcut. (Right-click > New > Shortcut.

2. In the box, type shutdown.exe -s -f -t [the time in second you want the computer to shutdown]. For example, I want to shutdown my computer in the next one hour (after I clicked the shortcut), I will type the following : 

shutdown.exe -s -f -t 3600

The -s command is the shutdown command. The -f command is the command used to force the shutdown process. So, any application/program that running will be stopped. The -t command is to set the time  for the shutdown process to occur.

Note: If you want to display a message/notification when the countdown is in progress just add the -c command. Example:

shutdown.exe -s -f -t 3600 -c "Shutting down computer.."

 

3. Click Next.

4. Type any name you want for the shortcut (ex:Shutdown) and click Finish.

5. To start the (shutdown) countdown, just double-click the shortcut item. A message/notification will appear showing that the computer will be logged off in the setting time.



Aborting  the Shutdown Process

Let’s say that you want to cancel a shutdown in progress. Do these:

1. Click the Start Menu button and type Run (or just simply press Windows Key + R)
2. Type the following command:

shutdown -a or shutdown /a

This will abort the shutdown, assuming that the counter hasn’t reached zero yet.

Tested OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit (Should work on all Windows-based OS)

Tutorial by basicxtutorial.