Put a shutdown timer on your Windows desktop with this command – CNET

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Taylor Martin/CNET

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to leave your computer on for several hours, but you want it to shut down once a certain process has finished, reddit user excelhelpneeded111 has a surprisingly simple solution. You don’t need any third-party software, and it will only take a minute or two to set up.

Create a shutdown timer for Windows

To create a shutdown timer manually, open Command Prompt and type the command shutdown -s -t XXXX. The “XXXX” should be the time in seconds you want to elapse before the computer shuts down. For instance, if you want the computer to shut down in two hours, the command should look like shutdown -s -t 7200.

If you input the wrong time or entered the command by mistake, you can cancel the timer by typing shutdown -a in Command Prompt.

Create a shutdown timer shortcut

If you need to use a shutdown timer regularly, you can take this trick one step further by turning it into a desktop shortcut.

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Taylor Martin/CNET

• Right-click on the desktop, hover over New and select Shortcut in the side menu.
• In the path field type “shutdown.exe -s -t XXXX” and click Next.
• Enter a name for the shortcut (for example, “Shutdown 1 Hour”) and click Finish.

Any time you double-click the shutdown shortcut, the timer will start. To cancel the timer, you can create a second shortcut using shutdown.exe -a or enter the shutdown -a command in Command Prompt.

If you later need to change the time on the shutdown timer, right-click the shortcut icon, select Properties and change the seconds value in the Target field. From within Properties, you can also assign a different image to the icon and toggle several other options.