Following up on my post yesterday regarding shutting down your PC at night durring the summer, sometimes you might have processes, such as a backup, which runs late at night. If this is the case, it isn’t feasible for you to manually shutdown your computer, so instead schedule your computer to shut itself down.

Here is how you can do this.

1. Open Notepad.
2. Type this (without the quotes): “shutdown -s -t 60″
3. This will shutdown the computer after displaying a 60 second warning on the screen.
4. Save the file as: “shutdown_computer.bat” (remember to change the file type to All Files in Notepad).
5. Use Windows Task Scheduler in the Control Panel to run “shutdown_computer.bat” at a time after all your nightly processes have completed.

Once you have this set up, you no longer have to remember to shutdown your computer at night… it will take care of itself.

Note: Windows XP has the shutdown command already built in, however Windows 2000 users will need to install the Windows 2000 Resource Tool Kit.