How to Shutdown your Computer Automatically at a specific time

This post will be useful for those people who have power-cuts in their areas. Recently we are facing power-cuts 2-3 hours per day, which are mostly early mornings. I will be downloading torrents during the nights, No one would like to getup from their deep sleep at 5 or 5:30 in the morning to shutdown the computer. My UPS backup time is around 15-20 minutes, in the deep sleep no one can be hardly able to listen the beep sound of a UPS. So that computer’s power supply will be interrupted causing some damage to Hard disk drive.

So I’ve got a solution for this, i.e., To create a Task that will be triggered at a specific time. Lets see how it is done:

How to Shutdown computer with Task Scheduler

#1. Click on Start. If you are using Windows 7 or Vista: type: “Task”, You can see Task Scheduler click on it.
i. If you are using Windows XP then click on: Start > All Programs > Accessibility > Task Scheduler or you can simply use a RUN Command: control schedtasks.
#2. In Task Scheduler, Click on Create Task..
#3. Name the Task in General Settings Tab and navigate to Triggers Tab, Under Triggers tab, Click New. Edit the settings like Begin the task, One time, daily or weekly, Time settings and advanced Settings and click OK.
#4. Navigate to Actions tab. In Actions Tab, Create a New task In New Actions Window: Under Program Script, paste this:

C:\Windows\System32\shutdown.exe

Add “/s” in arguments, without quotes.
Click on OK.
#5. To test the task, Select the task name and click on RUN in the right hand section.

While I don’t recommend any third party software for doing this, You can use Advanced Task Scheduler for this.

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