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Forcing the users to shutdown when their time is up!


If you have many users who uses your PC or even your home office/small office PC, you find it difficult to control the time they use the PCs, sometimes you have a hard time in explaining why you need the Pc to be shutdown after sometimes or why you need that “some one” to leave you PC for a particular time span. So here comes a handy solution for that, which will even be very useful to system administrators of enterprise level networks.

In order to do this, you need a third party utility application, because Microsoft hasn’t included this feature in their OS versions.

First thing first,


UtilityBeyond Logic Shutdown for NT/2000/XP is a simple freeware utility that you can schedule to run, and it will do the job every time without modifying user rights. Download the utility, and extract it into a directory.


Then, follow these steps:
  • Go to Start Run, type cmd, and press [Enter].

  • Navigate to the directory where the extracted file resides.

  • To view the different command parameters available, type shutdown /?.

  • Create a batch fileUsing this utility, we’ll create a batch file to run that enforces our time restrictions. Follow these steps:
  1. Go to Start Run, type notepad, and press [Enter].

  2. Type shutdown -s -f -c -l 30 -m “Time restrictions are now forcing you to logoff; please save all your work.”

  3. Go to File Save, and name the file Shutpc.bat, and save it in the same directory as the utility.

With this command, we’re forcing the machine to shut down, forcing applications to terminate at shutdown, preventing the user from cancelling the command, displaying a message box to inform the user what’s happening, and giving the user 30 seconds to save all work.


Next, we’ll schedule the batch file to run using the built-in scheduler.

Follow these steps:

  1. Go to Start Control Panel, and double-click the Schedule Tasks applet.

  2. Double-click Add Scheduled Task, and click Next.

  3. Click Browse, navigate to the Shutpc.bat file you just created, and double-click the file.

  4. You can change the name of the task or leave it; then, select Daily, and click Next.

  5. Configure the time you want to force logoff, and click Next.

  6. Enter the password for the account that’s going to run this task (it should be an administrator account), and click Next.

  7. Select the Open Advanced Properties For This Task When I Click Finish check box, and click Finish.

  8. On the Settings tab, deselect the Power Management check box.

  9. Click OK, and you’re finished!

This Utility can be very handy depending your job role, but even for the home users, this can be a veryt usefull one! Click here to visit TehcRepublic for the complete article!

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