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Put a Shut Down Button on Your Desktop

By Stephen Bucaro

Regardless of which version of Windows you use, it requires several steps to shut the system down. It's like this frustrating system won't let you go without one final bit of frustration. Well, you can reduce shut down to one step by placing a Shut Down shortcut on your desktop.

1. Right-click on an empty area of the desktop and, in the popup menu that appears, select New | Shortcut.

2. In the Create Shortcut dialog box that appears, type the following text:

shutdown -s -t 00

This executes the command shutdown.exe with the arguments -s (for shutdown, you could also use -r for restart), and -t 00 (which sets the delay time in seconds before shutdown).

3. Click on the [Next] button and, in the next screen of the Create Shortcut edit the suggested name for the shortcut to Shutdown. Click on the [Finish] button.

4. Right-click on the resulting shortcut and, in the Shutdown Properties dialog box that appears, select the Shortcut tab (if not already selected) and click on the [Change Icon...] button. Click the [OK] button to dismiss the warning box that appears.

5. In the Change Icon dialog box, select an icon for your shortcut. I like the red "lock" icon myself. Then click on the [OK] button. Click on the [Apply] and [OK] buttons in the Shutdown Properties dialog box.

Now when you want to shut down your computer, just double-click on your Shutdown shortcut. If you want to make it even easier, drag your shortcut to the Quick Launch area (the far left side) of the Task bar. Now you need only one click to shut down your computer.

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