On the Desktop, right-click (in a blank area) and go to "New", then to "Shortcut".
Clicking on "Shortcut"
Opens this window
Enter one of these as the path:
Windows 95, 98, or ME:
C:\windows\rundll.exe user.exe,exitwindows
Windows XP's shortcut wizard will ask you to
"Type the location of the item:"
Enter the following: SHUTDOWN -s -t 01
(Windows 95, 98 or ME)
Now, click on "Next"
Which takes you to this window.
Type in a name for your shortcut.
I just named mine "Shutdown".
Click on "Finished"
This is the shortcut
as it appears on my desktop.
I wanted an icon for the shortcut so I created one of my own.
This image is a gif. If you want a copy of my icon click here to download it. This is a zip file. Unzip it and save it to a location you can easily find. In my case, I have a folder on my hard drive named "Icons" where I keep icons I've created, or downloaded.
To change the icon, right click on the shortcut and (left) click on "Properties".
At the lower left of the "Properties" window, you'll see a button labelled "Change Icon".
Clicking on the "Change Icon" button opens this box:
Click on the "Browse" button and direct the computer to your icon's location. Once you've selected the icon, it will appear in the window of the "Change Icon" box. Click on "OK" in the "Change Icon" window, and "Apply" in the "Properties" Window to assign your icon to the shortcut.
Lastly, I decided that it would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut to activate my shutdown shortcut. Making a poor choice for a keyboard shortcut can cause you a great deal of grief, so if you decide to do this, be sure and use a combination of keys that you're highly unlikely to ever hit by accident, and one that isn't used by any software application on your system.
To create a keyboard shortcut, reopen the "Properties" of the shortcut (by the process explained above) and notice where it says "Shortcut key:" in the properties.
If you're like me, you'll try to highlight the word "None" before typing in a shortcut, and that won't work. Just click after the word "none" to place the cursor in the box, and press the key combination you want for your shortcut. The word "None" will vanish when you start pressing keys. Don't you love it when some little thing in Windows doesn't work like everything else in Windows? *grin* Me too! Anyway, I suggest some strange combination of keys you're unlikely to ever hit by accident.
Clicking on "Apply" will assign this key combination to your new shutdown shortcut, and click on "OK" to close the properties window.
You'll like the way this works! Your computer will shut down much faster than it ever has before.
Thanks for the great tip Irving!
Post Script 9-18-02: A friend of mine, who's the System Administrator for a hospital near Austin, Texas, wrote to tell me that this shortcut even works on his Windows 95 and 98 machines that have shutdown problems!
This tutorial, by Don Crowder, posted on June 20, 2004