Shutdown windows 10, 8 and 7 time controlled

There are always situations when you want to let your PC work unattended. For example, to install an update package or – as is likely to be the case more often – when you have started large downloads. Depending on your internet connection this can take several hours. Here I do not necessarily always sit in front of the PC.

So if I am on the road all day on sunday, I like to let my PC suck data out of the net. So that it does not run all the time and consumes power, although it is finished, I would like to shut it down time-controlled. how this works with all current windows versions (10, 8 and 7) i want to show in this blog post. As an example-windows in the screenshots comes to windows 10 to the application.

Everything runs via the windows prompt

windows 10 start menu prompt

For the timed shutdown of windows we need the command prompt. You will find this in windows 10 in the start menu under "all apps" and then in the folder "windows system". In the prompt you need the command "shutdown". Without parameters it does nothing. The following parameters are available for the shutdown command:

• shutdown /s -the parameter /s shuts down the PC immediately.
• Shutdown /s /t 300 – the additional parameter /t shuts down the computer within 300 seconds or. 5 minutes down.
• Shutdown /f – the parameter /f closes all open programs, if you want or not. Here it can come – if was not saved before – to data loss.
• shutdown /r – /r restarts the computer. So you can control for example also a reboot time. But in practice I have never used it.
• Shutdown /a – if you want to prevent the shutdown, you can use the parameter /a continue and abort the shutdown command if it was active.

So to shut down the computer in e.g. to shut down in three hours, because by then it has to deal with a download of ca. 2 hours 30 minutes, you have to enter the following in the command prompt shutdown /s /f /t 10800 enter. If other users are logged in on the PC, you can only shutdown the computer as administrator via the command prompt. You can do this, if you open the command prompt with a right click and select "run as administrator".

Then a message appears as windows-typical speech bubble, that the user will be logged off soon and gives the concrete time, as you could see here in the blog post lead photo above.

small anecdote at this point: in a network you can also shutdown other computers in the same network by specifying the computer name or IP-address. The command is then shutdown -m \\namedesotherpcs or shutdown -m \\192.168.2.104. In the berfusschool we always had fun to shutdown the computers of our classmates. nasty thing 😀 for the administration of several pcs but also very helpful. 🙂

open windows command prompt, command shutdown /s /f /t 300 and the computer shuts down in 5 minutes down. The time has to be given in seconds. All open programs are forced to close.

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Christopher piontek

I’m a tech-savvy blogger, part-time (remote) business information systems student, full-time web developer, and write on bitpage.I like to read technical news, tutorials and reviews. my favorite topics are #software, #internet and digital photography. Show all posts by christopher piontek

3 thoughts about "windows 10, 8 and 7 timed shutdown"

I used it back then with windows 7, it’s always handy, but it’s stupid when the download is not finished because there was a connection problem in between.

I have written a small shutdown program where I can specify a time when the pc should shut down. just a little gimmick, of course you don’t need it. 😀

Helped me a lot! Mega contribution, thank you!

I have used this command already 10 years ago it has worked only very rarely… because something has prevented this command or even unusable