How To Automatically Shut Down Your Windows 7 Computer

Windows 7 schedule auto shutdown

Method 1:

Below is the first screen shot after I clicked on the Start button and Control Panel.  You’ll find the Scheduled Tasks under System and Security. 

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Click on System and Security and you should see the Administrative Tool selections at the bottom of the control panel window.  Click on Schedule Tasks and you’ll be presented with the screen below.

The Task Scheduler is pretty much the same in Windows 7 as Windows Vista.  The Task Scheduler can look intimidating but it’s not too bad. Just move forward. We are going to look at one task and not all the extra stuff in Task Scheduler.

In the Actions column on the right, click Create Basic Task…

You’ll see the following window and I’ve already filled in the Name and Description of our task.

In the Actions column on the right, click Create Basic Task…

You’ll see the following window and I’ve already filled in the Name and Description of our task.

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After clicking Next you’ll see the Task Trigger screen. We want to shut down our Windows 7 computer in the middle of the night, every night so we’ll pick Daily.

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The next screen you’ll see is the Start Date and Time screen.

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The following screen is the Action screen. Let’s Start a program.

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The next screen you’ll see is the Start a Program screen.

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And finally the Summary screen.

Let’s take a look at our task in the Active Tasks list.

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Double-click the Task Name if you need to work with the settings.

Here’s the screen when the task fires off and starts to automatically shut down Windows 7. A window pops up telling us that Windows will shut down in less than a minute. You can click on the Close button but that will just close that window and Windows itself will continue to shut down.

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There’s quite a bit of detail with the shutdown.exe command and here is the output when you run the shutdown.exe /? command at the command prompt in Windows 7. It lists the choices of how you want to run the shutdown.exe command.

Method 2:

1. Create a bat file,for example, “shutdown.bat”
2. Add the following lines to this file
3. Right-Click this file then click Run as administrator

4. You can go to Task Scheduler to view/remove/disable this job.