Schedule computer to shut down

[koster]

Can you set up a PC to shut itself down at a certain time each day, e.g. 6pm?

[ChuckFickens]

you can, to save my fingers here will tell you how

http://www.winxptutor.com/schsd.htm

shutdown.exe will be located in c:\windows\system32

[koster]

Thanks!

[koster]

The only problem with that method is that (as far as I can see) the user has no option to cancel the shutdown.

What I really need is for a message to appear saying "computer will shut down in 3 minutes - click No to continue working". If the user does nothing, the computer will shut down.

I suppose, though, that it is possible to configure the scheduled task to only run if the computer has been idle for x minutes.

[ChuckFickens]

hmmm, there are bits of software about that would probably do what you want, but as a workaround you could specify a time delay for the shutdown and put a message on the delay window telling the user to click a certain icon to stop the shutdown, then create a desktop shortcut to shutdown.exe with the -a flag to abort the shutdown, i.e.

in the scheduled task it would have c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 180 -c "double click stop shutdown on desktop to abort"

Then on the desktop a shortcut called stop shutdown pointing to c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe -a

Does that make sense :)