Timed Shutdown

Would you like to be able to have your PC automatically shut itself down at a set time at night, so that you don't have to worry about going to bed and forgetting to turn it off? Or do you ever find yourself with a program running as you are about to leave the house and would like the PC to turn itself off after the program has finished? Or perhaps you have two or more PCs in your home network and you would like to be able to turn all PCs off from the PC you are working at? Well you can do all of these things, and much more, with a free utility called Poweroff that comes free courtesy of Belgian Jorgan Bosman.

You can dowload this utility from here and simply unzip the contents of the download to your desktop. You'll then find the Poweroff icon (above) on your desktop. Clicking on this brings up the user interface which, again, is pretty straightforward. There are basically four different sections in the interface that you have to make decisions about. The first is what computer you want to take an action on - this is either the local computer i.e. the one you are currently working on, or one of your network (remote) computers. The next decision is what action you want to take. You can see from the screenshot that there are quite a few actions but, in most cases, the one that will be of most interest is to Poweroff your computer. There is a set of options that can be selected, if required, such as to allow a machine to be controlled remotely or to display a message before an action is taken. Finally, there is the section to specify when the action is to be taken. This can either be immediately, after a process (program) has finished running, or according to a schedule that can be easily set up (time, date, day of week, etc).
PC Medic uses Poweroff to shut down the PC in the workshop every night at 11.00 pm and to turn off our multimedia PC after late night television programs have been recorded. Use it for a while and you'll wonder how you managed without it. Well worth the download.