Monday, July 27, 2009

Auto-shutdown of Windows when you want.



I found a very useful bit of free software recently that I have used several times.
I don't like to leave my pc on all the time but often need to render large video files in Sony Vegas that may take a few hours, this ties up my pc for a long time so I wanted a way of leaving the pc on, with a way of getting it to turn off at a given time in a nice controlled manner (i.e. Not a mains switch timer!).
I have also used this utility when leaving my pc to upload a large video to YouTube, works perfectly.

After trying several programs I found one thats very easy and it works.

Visit the shutdownmypc website
As you can see its only 589 KB, it works on Windows XP SP3.
When you click the download link the file is actually 1.81Mb, run this and it self extracts two programs, just delete the repair-pro-setup.exe program. Run the manageshutdown.exe to install it.
(Passes Norton Antivirus, AVG8, Spysweeper, Ad-aware.)

It can actually do lots of different things from the action menu but I only use the shutdown option. If you click the Force Action box then it will kill any apps that have crashed too before shutting down.

If using this to shutdown Sony Vegas, make sure you have saved the project and also ticked the "close this box when done" option in the render panel.

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