Turning off or rebooting XP involves a several-step process: click the Start menu, choose Shut Down, and then select Shut Down or Restart. If you want, however, you can exit or reboot much more quickly, by creating a shortcut that enables one-click shutdowns. You can also use the shortcut to customize the shutdown or rebootfor example, by displaying a specific message or automatically shutting down any programs that are running.
First, create a shortcut on your desktop by right-clicking on the desktop, choosing New, and then choosing Shortcut. The Create Shortcut Wizard appears. In the box asking for the location of the shortcut, type shutdown. After you create the shortcut, double-clicking on it will shut down your PC.
But you can do much more with a shutdown shortcut than merely shut down your PC. You can add any combination of several switches to do extra duty. The following is an example:
shutdown -r -t 01
Double-clicking on that shortcut will reboot your PC after a one-second delay. To shut down the computer, just change "-r" to "-s"
The following are the Switches to be usesd:
-s: Shuts down the PC.
-l: Logs off the current user.
-t (nn): Indicates the duration of delay, in seconds, before performing the action.
-c "messagetext": Displays a message in the System Shutdown window. A maximum of 127 characters can be used. The message must be enclosed in quotation marks.
-f: Forces any running applications to shut down.
-r: Reboots the PC.
