How to Automatically Shutdown Windows XP

USA Today published an article titled Leaving PCs on overnight costs companies $2.8B a year.

The article talks about how businesses lose 2.8 billion dollars a year when they leave computers on, unused, all night.  In addition, this adds 20 million tons of carbon dioxide, etc.  So I thought I’d record a screencast video using the freely available ScreenToaster. to show you how you can automatically shutdown your Windows XP machine.

A Note on Screen Recording Software

While the video I created is under 8 minutes, it took over 1 hour to upload to YouTube using the upload to YouTube feature provided by ScreenToaster.  Also, the audio gets ahead of the video in spots as well as slurred my S’s quite a bit and even skipped some audio parts.

The other feature that I did not see is panning and zooming which allows you to pan around the screen and zoom in closer to what you’re doing on the screen, making it much better for viewing.

If you’re interested in doing screencast videos, you can try the freely available CamStudio.  Camtasia Studio is yet another screen recording tool and cost over $100.00 but makes it pretty darn easy to create screencasts with many features that help get the point across.

Shutting Down Windows XP Automatically

Here are the steps to shut down your Windows XP machine automatically:

1. Click on Start
2. Click on Control Panel
3. Click on Performance and Maintenance
4. Click on Scheduled Tasks
5. Double click “Add Scheduled Task”
6. You’ll be at the first wizard screen for setting up a task – click next
7. Click Browse…
8. Navigate to or type in the file name box – file c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe
9. Name the task – “Daily Shutdown”
10. Select Daily to perform task daily and click next
11. Set the Start time to when you’d like to shut down your Windows XP machine.  I set mine for 2:00am.  Perform the task Daily and click next.
12. Fill in the user name and password, click next.
13. Check the “Open advanced properties…” check box and click Finish.
14. Add these parameters to the end of shutdown.exe so it looks like this: c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 60 -c “Shutting Down…” -f
15. Click OK and re-enter your user name and password
16. That’s it!!  Finished.

Now your PC will automatically shut down at 2:00am no matter what.

Here’s the explanation on the command line:

The -s tells shutdown.exe to shut down the computer.  The -t 60 tells shutdown.exe to allow 60 seconds before shutting down the machine.  The -c displays the message “Shutting Down…” and the -f says force the shut down no matter what, even if a program or programs are running.

I re-recorded the video and I used Camtasia Studio to create it instead of ScreenToaster. Here’s the link to the ScreenToaster version on YouTube and below is the re-recorded version using Camtasia Studio.

Tagged as: camstudio, camtasia, screen recording, screencast, screentoaster, usa today