How to Make your PC Shut Down at Night (But only when We are not using it)?
By Prempal Singh
We always keep our PC shut down when we are not using it. But sometimes, we forget to shut down and leave it on? Here’s how to configure Windows to automatically power down at night, but only if we are not using the PC at the time.
We really recommend you to keep your PC on sleep rather than shut down. Here Sleep and hibernation have both come a long way since the early days of Windows and if you avoid using them because you used to have problems, you might be pleasantly surprised with how well they work now.
And of course, we really like to shut our PC down automatically instead, we understand. And it is not hard to do.
Press the Start button, and type “task scheduler,” and then press the “Task Scheduler” app.
In the Task Scheduler window, in the “Actions” pane, Press “Create Task.”
On the “General” tab of the Create Task window, give the new task whatever name we want. We like putting a “z_” before any user-created tasks just so that they’re easier to find later with a quick alphabetical sort. Select both the “Run whether user is logged on or not” option and “Run with highest privileges” options. On the “Configure for” drop-down, select your version of Windows.
Next, switch to the “Triggers” tab. Press “New” to create a new trigger.
In the New Trigger window, make sure the “Begin the task” dropdown menu is set to “On a schedule.” Set up whatever schedule you like. Here, we are going with every night at midnight. When you are done setting up your schedule, Press “OK.”
Back in the “Create Task” window, switch over to the “Actions” tab and Press “New” to create a new action.
In the “New Action” window, set the “Action” drop-down menu to “Start a program.” Type “shutdown” into the “Program/script” box. In the “Add arguments (optional)” box, type “/S” to have the task start a basic shutdown command—the same as if we clicked the Shut Down button ourself. If we want the command to also force any running applications to close without warning users, type “/S /F” into the “Parameters” box instead. When we are done, Press “OK.”
Back in the “Create Task” window, switch over to the “Conditions” tab. Enable the “Start the task only if the computer is idle for” option and set the timing according to us.
We also have two other options to consider here. Enable the “Stop if the computer ceases to be idle” option to stop the task if you start using your PC. And enable the “Restart if the idle state resumes” to have the task begin measuring idle time again when we stop using our PC. We recommend going ahead and enabling both those options.
Next, switch to the “Settings” tab. Here, we can set our task up so that it will run again every so often if it fails to run successfully. This lets the task shut down our PC if we are up using it for much longer than we expected to be. Enable the “If the task fails, restart every” option and then set your preferences. Here, we are having the task restart every thirty minutes and we are letting it try restarting up to three times. When we are done, then press “OK” to create the task.
Note that we will likely be asked to enter our user account password to finish creating the task. Then give our user account password and press “OK” we can now exit Task Scheduler.
From this point on, our PC should shut down automatically at whatever time we scheduled—unless we are using the PC at that time.