There are several ways you can shut down your personal computer but most of them are tedious and involve more than one step. Now imagine if you are in a hurry and you just want to shut down by one click what would you do? Honestly you just cant do anything other than the tedious stepped steps. In this post I will tell you 2 ways you can make shutdown little quick. First, let us take a quick look on the various methods available running on Windows XP and then we will see how to make it quick ?

Methods available for shutting/ restart your pc/ computer

• Start -> Turn Off Computer -> Turn Off
• The Window Key -> press letter u (twice)
• By pressing the “Power” button on your cabinet
• Create a shortcut

The first two methods are simple and works on every computer. However, the last two methods are going to make a difference if you are a power user.

How to shutdown or restart your computer with a shortcut ?

Dont want to make you wait for long, so here is the last point first.Now, getting to the restarting part, it is similar to the shutting down part as well and it can be done by:

• Clicking Start -> Turn Off Computer -> Restart
• Window Key ->letter u -> letter r
• Pressing the restart button on the cabinet.

However, instead of this, you can shut down and restart your computer by simply double clicking a shortcut file .

• On your desktop make a right click and then select New->Shortcut

  

• For “Type the location of the item” type shutdown -r -t 0

  

• Click Next, then enter a name, such as Restart PC

  

That’s it. Whenever you double click the shortcut, your PC will automatically restart.

NOTE: If you want your PC to Shut down instead of restart, then all you have to do is change the ”r” to a “s”. i.e., shutdown -s -t 0.

The easier method, would however be to press the restart button on the cabinet but that certainly is not the safest and should only be used during times of emergency (computer not responding and so on).

How to enable shutdown through power button ?

If you are not comfortable with using shortcuts, use power button. Power Button is most of the time a big sized button. The usage is to do a instant shutdown but you need to setup the function for the Power button to perform when pressed. This can be done by the following steps

• Right click on the desktop.
• Click on Properties
• Click on the Screensaver tab
• Select the Power option at the bottom
• Click on the Advanced tab
• In the drop-down menu under the line “When I press the power button on my computer” select Shut down. You can also select other options as per your needs.
• Click on Apply

By doing this, whenever you press the Power button on your cabinet, the computer shuts down as normally as it would when it is shut down using the default methods. This has come in useful for me in a lot of occasions. During powercuts, the monitor which is not connected to the UPS will not function. So, it would be difficult for me to shut down the system by using the mouse and selecting the menu options. Then, a single press of the Power button would do the job.

This post was contributed by Vijay who blogs about Website and Web Service Reviews at Siteguide Do visit his site for more guidance on websites and services. If you have any questions feel free to ask him. I hope you enjoyed the article