How to create a shutdown, restart, or logoff shortcut on your desktop
By Mitz
Free computer Tips Video – How to create a shutdown, restart, or logoff shortcut on your desktop
Instead of going to the start menu, choosing shutdown, then waiting for the computer to shut all the programs down, you can create a shortcut on the desktop to do it quickly. You can create a shutdown, restart, or a logoff icon on your desktop which will work a lot quicker than using the usual buttons in the start menu.
Here’s how to create a shutdown shortcut on your desktop
- Go to your blank desktop
- Right click on a blank space and a menu will appear
- Choose New from the menu
- Then choose Shortcut
- Where it says type the location of the item type in shutdown.exe -s
- Then press next
- Now enter a name for your icon. Mine is called SHUTDOWN NOW
- Press next
- The Shutdown shortcut will be on your desktop
Different combination you can type in when creating a shortcut to shutdown, restart, or logoff.
Shutdown.exe -s
Shutsdown your computer in 30 seconds and will close all programs and ask you to save all work.
shutdown.exe -r
Restarts your computer in 30 seconds.
shutdown.exe -l
This one will logoff your computer back to the welcome screen where you will need to login again.
shutdown.exe -s -t 1
Shutsdown your computer in one second. the -t 1 tells it how long to wait. (one second in this case) You can put -t 10 or even -t 1120.
shutdown.exe -s -t 15 -c “Goodbye you idiot”
This is my favorite code. It will shutdown in 15 seconds and have a message in the box saying “Goodbye you idiot”
The -c “bla bla bla” stands for a comment.
Notes:
- to stop the computer from shutting down type shutdown /a into the run box located in the start menu..
- -f will force everything to close immediately without asking to save anything.






[...] Watch this video tutorial on how to create a shutdown icon on your desktop. And I forgot to mention that you can change the look of the icon by right clicking on the icon and choosing properties, then choosing to change icon. Also see this article on How to create a shutdown, restart, or logoff shortcut on your desktop [...]