Add an Icon to Shutdown PC

I always shut my computers down when I'm not using them. It's not so much to save energy, but to save money. I think the current way of opening your Start menu to click the arrow and then "shutdown" is too long of a procedure just to shut the computer off. Many people, I'm sure just press the power button or leave it on all day.

Here's an easy way to add a shutdown icon to your desktop in XP. Vista and Win 7.

Right click the destop and select New

Click "Shortcut"

In the box type exactly with the spaces shown below:

shutdown -s -t 00

Hit Enter

Next, name your shortcut. It will already say 'shutdown', but you can put whatever you choose.

Then hit enter.

It's time to customize your icon. Right-click the icon and choose "Properties", then select "Change Icon"

On the next screen, just pick the one you want to use and select OK

I chose to have the Alien head for my Alienware laptop

From now on you can just double click to shutdown your PC. No more having to go through the start menu. Even my 2 year old has mastered it.

TGS

you could just use the button on your keyboard :P or press Start, U, then U again, i think. im running vista, so theres no shutdown button anymore.

Alt-F4 does it. Or, my Power button does it all :)

thats a nifty little bit of info

why would you wanna shutdown your system?

I turn my computer on to use it, then turn it off. Anything else is a waste of electricity.

and we all know wasting is bad. especially when you live cali and rolling blackouts are a threat during peak hours

When I worked for Microsoft as a Windows 95 PRG Tech2 we all found it ironic that you had to click "Start" in order to STOP your machine.

Another great shortcut opens explorer in the "C:\" drive rather than "My Computer".

C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe /e,C:\
Its my first icon on my quick launch bar.

"Assistance is futile!" - Helpdesk motto

AFAIK most computers these days perform the equivalent to start > shutdown by just pressing the power button

I suspend my computer from a button on my keyboard, then to turn it back on, the power button or the suspend works again, boots up in 1/10th of the time, and doesnt close any of my apps (I still recommend saving first)...

Which makes me wonder, what _Exactly_ does suspend do, it seems to shut down too fast to copy ram contents to the hard drive, and boots up even faster... So i'm guessing it just pumps power through the ram, but dont know for sure...

If all else fails, hitting the suspend key on keyboards at school is always a fun past time to waste others time :)

-Fragged

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Originally Posted by AKA_RA

and we all know wasting is bad. especially when you live cali and rolling blackouts are a threat during peak hours

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I have to say that during the rolling blackouts my house was never affected. Not once. However at work we were hit 3 times. After the first planned blackout, dozens of companies sued pg&e to get them to pre-announce blackout areas and times, since several companies lost 100's of thousands of dollars due to equipment failures caused by the rolling blackouts. In my lab alone I paid about $120,000 to replace parts that failed after the first loss of power.

What I don't get though is that while intel, amd, mips, and sun, continue to lower the power requirements of thier chips, nvidia and ati's gpus continue to increase in power requirements, to the point of needing a 1kw psu for the next gen graphics cards. I recently read a report that the next gen cards will consume as much as 300 watts _each_! (x2 for sli...) This is up from around 120 watts each currently.

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Which makes me wonder, what _Exactly_ does suspend do

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Here's a little of what it says in the BIOS power managent section of a M/B manual I have handy. bear in mind this is an old board.

The system consumption is reduced according to the following sequence"
Normal > Doze > Standby > Suspend. Each mode can have its own timer set for its events rangeing from 1 minute to 1 hour.

events can be assignemd to each stage or stages can be skipped deopending on user sonfiguration.

for instance. You could park the HDD if its not used in say 5 minutes (Doze) then turn of the monitor after another 10 minutes (Standby) and finaly throttle down the CPU by 12.5%-75% (suspend).

you can also set wake up events as well Like wake on LAN, wake on COM2 (you can dial up with a modem and remotely start your machine), etc. the most common are wake on mouse (com1 or USB) and wake on keyboard.

When power managment first became a big thing people used to turn everything on (to save the most power) but didn't set any wake on, commands. So their machines would go into a coma and have to be cold booted to wake em up. This was very common with laptops.

If your really interested in power management info you might want to read your M/B manual regarding your BIOS settings.

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Which makes me wonder, what _Exactly_ does suspend do

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from what i know suspend throttles down your cpu, spins down you HDD but keeps power to ram holding on to your currently running programs. hibernate on the other hand will read the ram into the hard drive and then shut down the computer. when you start back up from a hibernate the saved state is loaded back into ram. kinda like an ISO image

Sorry to bump this but I love the idea of a shutdown Icon. I added it to all the comps in my home

I did mine and even got the right Icon as well.

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Originally Posted by fragged

AFAIK ...

Which makes me wonder, what _Exactly_ does suspend do, it seems to shut down too fast to copy ram contents to the hard drive, and boots up even faster... So i'm guessing it just pumps power through the ram, but dont know for sure...

...

-Fragged

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You have the power management setting in the BIOS set to "STR" - "Suspend To Ram".

Exactly as you speculate this maintains the working state of the computer in RAM and powers that whilst powering down all other components. It is a low power state that as you also note allows for very quick restarting of the computer.

The main danger is that in a blackout you will lose the current state of programs and any unsaved work - your instinct to save work first is a good one. There is also probably some minor effect on the life of the RAM but compared to constantly powering up and down the RAM this may be small or even beneficial - I have no idea if it has been researched.

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