I often process my Windows updates at the end of the day. Sometimes these updates take a long time to process and I don’t want to wait around for them to finish. It’s easy to schedule your PC to shutdown every night at the same time, and as you will see, the built-in task scheduler takes care of many of the exceptions you are probably thinking about.
- Open Control Panel in Classic View and double-click on Scheduled Tasks.
- Double-click on Add Scheduled Task followed by Next in the Scheduled Task Wizard
- Click the Browse button, navigate to C:\Windows\system32\ and choose shutdown.exe.
- Give the task a name – something like shutdown would be appropriate.
- Choose Daily and then click Next.
- Choose a Start time that fits your schedule – for me 9 PM.
- Choose Every Day under Perform this task, today’s date under Start date and then click Next.
- Enter your user name and password and then click Next.
- Make sure that the Open advanced properties… box has a checkmark in it and click Finish.
- Check the box at the bottom of the Settings tab to enable this job.
- Refer to the image below for guidance on completing the Settings tab. After completing this tab click OK and your PC will now shutdown all by itself.
In summary this task will run the shudown.exe file at 9 PM every night if the PC has been idle for 10 or more minutes. If the PC is idle for 10 minutes at any time within the next 4 hours this task will run; if not then the job will expire.