How To Create Shutdown and Restart Buttons on your desktop

Want to be able to click a button on your desktop to shutdown your computer instead of having to click “Start -> Turn Off Computer -> Turn Off” every single time? All you have to do is create a shortcut on your desktop that points to shutdown.exe with the right switches. When you have finished it could look something like this…

Creating a Shutdown button:

Right click the desktop and select new -> shortcut and the Create Shortcut wizard will appear. Click the browse button and browse to C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe and click OK…

Now add the switches by typing “-s -t 0″ (without quotes, zero not the letter o, and spaces between -s & -t & 0) to the end of the text in the location box as shown below…

Now click next and finish. You will now have a functioning but ugly shutdown button on your desktop…

To make it look nicer rename the shortcut then right click, select properties, and select Change Icon to select a better icon.

Create a Restart button:

It might seem a little strange but Windows XP restarts using the same shutdown.exe file. To create a restart button follow the same steps above but use a -r switch instead of a -s switch…

After creating both shortcuts, renaming them and changing the icons, you should have something like this…

Shutdown.exe switches: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317371

12 Responses to “ How To Create Shutdown and Restart Buttons on your desktop ”

Comments:

ViniMan says:
May 24th, 2008 at 4:39 am

On that MS support website stands a description of “msg”. For making a message appear while logging out, do you know how to do that? And how to create a Stand-By shortcut button?

jason says:
May 26th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

Saw your post on LinkMarker and I must say this is the something I’ve never thought of, am gonna give this a try. :)

rsfeller says:
August 22nd, 2008 at 2:47 pm

because it’s so hard to hit the start button!?!?!

brett says:
August 31st, 2008 at 3:00 pm

Hi ViniMan thanks for commenting. To show a comment while shutting down or restarting, add a “-c” switch like this…

%windir%\system32\shutdown.exe -s -c “goodbye cruel world!” -t 5

Notice I have changed the -t value from 0 to 5. This will cause shutdown.exe to wait 5 seconds before executing, otherwise you won’t have time to read the message.

To put the system into standby you need to use rundll32.exe so the shortcut target would be…

C:\WINDOWS\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Standby

Which only leaves logoff and hibernate so I will list them here too…

Logoff:
C:\WINDOWS\System32\shutdown.exe -l

Hibernate:
C:\WINDOWS\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Hibernate

jaspreet says:
November 27th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

how i set time of shutdown.exe command

Prestone says:
March 21st, 2009 at 3:24 am

Cool

Is it possible to make a restart button but who will restart on another partition? It is to go on an other OS?

thanks

brett says:
September 16th, 2010 at 5:47 pm

jaspreet, the time is set by the last switch. i.e the zero in this image means no delay, so change it to 3 for a 3 second delay.

Sorry Prestone I am not aware of a way to restart a different partition udinh shutdown.exe. You would need to use a boot manager to do that.

Helen says:
October 1st, 2010 at 8:12 pm

Does anybody know how to make a comment come up, and give an option to prevent the shutdown if the terms of the message are not fulfilled?

i.e I need a mesage to come up for my team to say ‘Have you moved your files back to the network’ when they shut down, which i have managed to achieve with the instructions above (thanks), but i need the user to be able to stop the shutdown and go back to move their files if they havent done so…any ideas?

thanks!

Buboy says:
September 10th, 2012 at 12:47 pm

thanks for sharing

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