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Can anyone suggest a way of asking Windows to shut down after it has finished doing something? For example it would be handy sometimes if burning a DVD or copying a lot of files to be able to set it off at the end of the day and just say "hey Windows, when you've finished doing this, shut down."

At the moment the best alternative I've found is to use a commandline shutdown and guess at a time but particularly with things like file operations windows can make it a trifle difficult to predict how long they will take so you have to be very conservative in your guesswork and probably leave the computer running for much longer than necessary in most cases or risk the job not being finished.

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
5

Poweroff can schedule a shutdown when an application finishes.

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The two solutions I can think of are to either find an alternate application that supports shutdown after it finishes. (CDBurnerXP supports it - Available on Ninite), or launch your application from a script.

For example, you can copy and paste this to notepad:

NOTEPAD

SHUTDOWN /S

Save this as anything you want with a .BAT or .CMD extension then simply launch it whenever you want.

This should launch notepad, then when you close, give a 30 second count down (You can open a new command prompt window and type SHUTDOWN /A to abort).

You can adapt this to do what you want.

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  • I was gonna answer with a bat at first but figured I should take a swing at google lol. Yea .bat or using an alternative program for the need with it built in seems the only way to go. For file copying you might be able to find an alternative file explorer. Although I could not find one with shutdown ability.
    – Unfundednut
    Jan 25, 2010 at 11:47
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    You can always do the copy or move command inside the batch file...
    – William Hilsum
    Jan 25, 2010 at 11:50
  • Two good answers here, I'm going to go with Poweroff for now, but this one is also appreciated - I didn't realise that bat files were so serial in nature.
    – glenatron
    Jan 25, 2010 at 13:03
  • They don't have to be, if you replace "notepad" with "start notepad" it will do it separately and continue. Making batch files process in order and waiting is one of the best benefits!
    – William Hilsum
    Jan 25, 2010 at 13:09
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Maybe something like PsList on a 5 min loop combined with you current batch file?

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