Do you shutdown your PC at night?

Do you normally shutdown your PC at night? Or you forget it most of the time? In this era of “Going Green”, everyone is expected to shut down down the PC and save energy when you are not using it. That’s right – only when you are  not using or when the PC is idle.

We are humans and we tend to forget. Here’s a nice solution to let the machines do the job for you. You can configure Windows to automatically power down at night, if you’re not using the PC at that time. All you need to do is to create a task to shutdown (or hibernate) your computer, triggered after a certain time, but dependent on idleness.

Let me walk you through the whole process in Windows 7.

First open up Task Scheduler  (in the start menu type task scheduler) to create the new job. Click on the Create Task link on the right-hand side.

In the create Task window, give the task a name, and check the box for “Run with highest privileges”.

In the Triggers tab, click New, and then setup a daily schedule to fit your needs.

In the Actions tab, click New, and then enter shutdown in the Program box, and /S into the parameters box.

In the Conditions tab check the box to only start the task if the computer is idle for more than 30 minutes. Also choose to stop the task if the PC isn’t idle.

In the Settings tab choose to restart the task every 30 minutes if the task fails.

Save the task and that’s it – you don’t have to worry about shutting down your PC at night anymore.