How to Automatically Shut Down a Windows PC at Night

 To automatically shut down your Windows
computer at night, we are going to use
the regular “Task Scheduler.” To open the
Task Scheduler, press the Start button and
search for and click on the option “Task
Scheduler.” shutdown-search-task-scheduler.png Once the “Task Scheduler” has been
opened, select “Create Basic Task” from
the “Actions” panel located on the right
side. [IMG] The above action will open the task
creation wizard. Here enter a meaningful
name and description of the task you are
going to create, then click on the “Next”
button. That way, you can easily find the
task when needed. [IMG] Here in this screen, select the radio button
“Daily” and click on the “Next” button to
continue. [IMG] Now enter the starting date and time.
Also, make sure that you are choosing for
the task to reoccur every day. [IMG] Since we are going to shut down the
system, select the radio button “Start a
program” and click on the “Next” button
to continue. [IMG] Now enter “shutdown” in the program or
script field and as the argument, enter /S. You can also enter /F as the second argument which forces your Windows
computer to shut down. This is helpful
when you have programs which may
conflict with the shutdown process. Make
sure that you add a space between the
two arguments. [IMG] Once you are done with the configuration,
just go through the summary, and if
everything is fine, click on the “Finish”
button. You are not yet finished, though. [IMG] Back to the main window, find the task
you just created, right-click on it and
select the option “Properties.” [IMG] The above action will open the task
properties window. Here in the “General”
section, select the checkbox “Run with
highest privileges.” [IMG] Navigate to the “Conditions” tab and
select all three check boxes: “Start the
task only if the computer is idle for,” “Stop
if the computer ceases to be idle,” and
“Restart if the idle state resumes.” Also,
select the time as “30 minutes” in both the fields. [IMG] Once you are done, navigate to the
“Settings” tab. Here select the check
boxes “Run task as soon as possible after
a scheduled start is missed” and “If the
task fails, start every.” Now, enter the
time as “30 minutes” and the number of attempts as “3.” Also, change the time of
“Stop the task if it runs longer than” to
one hour. [IMG] Once you are done with settings, click on
the “Ok” button to save the changes. With
this, you have successfully configured the
automatic shutdown at night. If you ever need to, you can always change
the settings as required from Task
Scheduler’s main window. That’s all there is to do, and it is that
simple to use task scheduler to configure
automatic shutdown at night when not in
use.