Windows lacks the linux ’shutdown’ command, so it is a pain to get it to schedule a reboot in the future. Linux’s shutdown command make this easy, just issue the command ’shutdown -r +60′ for example to reboot an hour in the future.

No such luck in Windows, you need to download a separate program to do this. It is a sysinternals program, you might remember sysinternals from such utilies like FileMon and ProcessMonitor.

The program we use for this is called PsTools and more specifically the file psshutdown.exe.

[Download PsTools here]

Place psshutdown.exe into a directory for future use, for this example we will use c:\tools\.

Then open a command prompt and type the following command:

at 2:00am c:\tools\psshutdown.exe -r -f -c -t 10 /accepteula

This will result in:

Added a new job with ID = 1

You can verify this task has been added by looking at the Scheduled Tasks - the job name will be At1 if you haven’t scheduled any other tasks via the command line.

If all goes will, Windows will reboot at 2:00am, or your specified time.


This post has 2 comments. Add your own.

Comments

Ronny Ong - 30 Jul 08 at 18:35:28

Actually, the shutdown command is built into virtually every version of Windows released in the last 8 years:

XP (Pro/Tablet/Media Center Editions)
Vista (All Editions)
Server 2003 (All Editions)
Server 2008 (All Editions)

The only exception is XP Home Edition.

Syntax example: shutdown -r -f -t 10

In fact, your use of psshutdown with Scheduled Tasks is silly because one of the main reasons to use psshutdown instead of the built-in shutdown is that the -t option of psshutdown supports HH:MM (time in 24-hour format) in addition to NN (number of seconds). So your example could have been:

psshutdown -r -f -c -t 02:00 /accepteula

Which is better because it does not rely upon the Task Scheduler service being enabled and running. Instead, psshutdown temporarily installs its own service. Occasionally, anti-malware which has been set to paranoid settings may block this, but typically such settings would also block the addition of a Scheduled Task.

http://solfrejazz.livejournal.com/ - 05 Aug 08 at 16:18:04

I\’m assuming you mean turn of the computer, and not restart it. Please tell me if I\’m wrong. And if I\’m right - my comment is this: I would like to know how to schedule a shut-down of a mac computer.

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