image4 Now, you could shutdown or reboot your PC from your desktop quickly! Here’s how:

Create a shortcut on your desktop:

  • Right-click on the desktop
  • Choose New
  • Then choose Shortcut. The Create Shortcut Wizard appears.
  • In the box asking for the location of the shortcut, type shutdown.
  • After you create the shortcut, double-clicking on it will shut down your PC.

Doing more with the shutdown shortcut:

You can do much more with a ’shutdown shortcut’ than merely shut down your PC. You can add any combination of several switches to do extra duty, like this:

shutdown -r -t 01 -c “Rebooting your PC”

Double-clicking on that shortcut will reboot your PC after a one-second delay and display the message “Rebooting your PC.”

The shutdown command includes a variety of switches you can use to customize it. I use this technique to create two shutdown shortcuts on my desktop — one, for turning off my PC, and other for rebooting.

Here are the ones I use:

shutdown -s -t 03 -c “Bye Bye m8!”
shutdown -r -t 03 -c “Ill be back m8 ;)!”

Switch - What it does:

-s
Shuts down the PC.

-l
Logs off the current user.

-t nn
Indicates the duration of delay, in seconds, before performing the action.

-c “messagetext”
Displays a message in the System Shutdown window. A maximum of 127 characters can be used. The message must be enclosed in quotation marks.

-f
Forces any running applications to shut down.

-r
Reboots the PC.