You need to properly close all running programs before shutting down Windows everyone knows that, still you can get sometimes dialog with Windows to “Force shutdown” windows because of some programs still running in the background. If you use your Computer daily, you can get this dialog every day (the case with me).
It happens to everyone, you click on “Shutdown” button on Start Menu and walk away from system thinking that windows will shut down and power to CPU will be off with in a minute or two.
That’s not case, when you see your Computer again after few hours Computer it is still powered on and Windows is waiting for background programs to close, isn’t it annoying? Here you can click on Force Shutdown button or get back to windows session by clicking “Cancel” button. In the meantime, lot of power has been lost, don’t make that happen again.
We’ve covered a registry hack that minimizes windows waiting time to automatically kill processes to 5 seconds, even easier way is to use shutdown command with ‘f’ parameter. Instead to run this command every time manually, when you about to shutdown Windows, you can create a shortcut (this will be really helpful).
Creating a shortcut Windows 7 to forcibly close running apps on shutdown
Right-click on desktop and browse for New>Shortcut> type “Shutdown -s -f” (without quotes), click ‘Next’ and name the shutdown command as you like.
You can right-click on created shortcut icon, and select properties and change its icon to your desired one from Shell32.dll file in “System 32” directory via Explorer.
Thing for you to know: Windows never shuts down when unsaved notepad is open, save your work and close the notepad which always prevents windows from shutting down.
Bonus: You can also create shortcut with “shutdown -a” which aborts windows shutdown you initiated. Use “shutdown -r” to reboot your Computer.
Works Great ! Just what I needed.