# Important Save Electricity



## 00lissauers (Apr 25, 2005)

Power Saving

Taken from PC Pro Magazine Issue 128, Page 33

Article:

I have several clients who've been using this simple technique to switch off PC's overnight successfully for 18 months. Create a scheduled task on Windows XP computers to force shutdown:

Shutdown /s /f
Or, better, to force hibernation:
Shutdown /h /f

XP doesn't accept this as a command directly in a scheduled task,

To get it to work:

1. Create a script called C:\shutdown.bat or C:\shutdown.cmd
2. The script should contain the command:

C:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe /s /f <enter>
Or,
C:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe /h /f <enter>

3. Create a scheduled task to run this script at 8PM as and Administrator.
4. Choose setting to:
a. Stop the task if it runs for 5 hours.
b. Only start the task if the computer has been idle for 60 minutes.
c. If the computer hasn't been idle for that long, retry for up to 300 minutes (so 1AM if started at 8PM).

Administrators can deploy the script to the C$ shares and the scheduled task to the Scheduled Task shared folders on clients.

One word of warning, if you are choosing to shut down your computer then warn users that any work that is left open overnight will not be saved during forced shutdown !


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## cybertech (Apr 16, 2002)

I've moved your post to the Tips forum where I think you'll get better response.


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