Subscribe by EmailAutomate PC shutdowns with Poweroff 3.0
December 8, 2007 by Mark O'Neill | 11 commentsBy Mark O’Neill
I have a lot of scheduled tasks running during the night when I am snoozing away in bed – virus scans, spyware scans, cleaning out the crap with CCleaner and much more. But at the same time, I get a lot of grief from the girlfriend about leaving the computer on all night and running up the electricity bill. So to placate her, I went online and found a tool that will shut down your PC at a specified time. It’s called Poweroff 3.0.
But to call it a “shutdown tool” really minimises its full potential. As well as telling it to shutdown, you can also choose for the computer to reboot (for example after Windows security updates have been installed), hibernation mode and turning the monitor on and off. There are other options too (see the screenshot) but since I would never use them, I haven’t taken the time to learn about them. But I am about to test the “remote” function where you can manipulate your computer from another location. Our house has four computers in a local network and in theory I should be able to switch off the computer downstairs from the one upstairs.
What is really good about Poweroff 3.0 is that it can be run off a USB stick as it is an executable file which doesn’t have to be installed on the PC. Just double-click the exe file and it is ready to go. So this would be a handy addition for a tech’s USB stick. Are you installing Windows security updates on a client’s computer? Then get the updates started, tell Poweroff 3.0 to restart the system when the patches are installed and you can run off for a coffee break in the meantime!
Poweroff 3.0 is freeware and open-source. However, the download page doesn’t specify if the program works on Vista computers. But since the program is open-source, I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to tweak the code for it to work on Vista systems.
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great tool. Thanks !
I think you have to guess beforehand the time expected for updates to complete.
About being able to run on Vista, I guess that it should.
@Jalaj : You don’t have to guess beforehand the time expected for updates to complete. You can tell Poweroff to start when “a process stops”. So choose the Windows Update process and when the updates have finished, Poweroff kicks in and restarts the system for you.
Oh! I missed the last line in the form image… that’s a very good app.
You can not only control your own pc but others in network too (the application being installed there beforehand with Allow Remote Control Settings applied). You can even control the monitor!
I would love to do RND for what WinAPI functions are used there.
or, you can use the shutdown command in a batch file.
i use shutdown rebooot at 4 am, so that my ipod can sync. then at 4:30 it shutsdown for good.
i use the winternals programs to log in.
I actually have a VBScript that I put together that can do this without all the hubbub of using a third-party program…
Force download of windows updates, email results
I dunno – in general, I like to try to use as many native apps as I can to perform routine system tasks. With a shutdown/restart, I just use the built-in restart tool provided by Microsoft with the installation of Windows.
However, with that being said, there are some tasks here that cannot be done natively (at least not without a modicum of scripting knowledge).
This post just made Lifehacker – http://lifehacker.com/software/featured-windows-download/automate-windows-shutdown-with-poweroff-331985.php
Useful program. But on my Vista not work. I use Nero shutdown program.