Most likely, more than one occasion you have turned off the computer and the screen and you have left confident that it has been closed. Or, lower the lid of the laptop confident that you’ve started the shutdown process.
But the next day you find out that it stayed on because you didn’t realize you left a file open. Find out how to prevent open tasks from blocking Windows shutdown.
When the Windows 10 shutdown process begins and an application is open, an alert message may appear to the user to confirm the shutdown even with the applications. This usually happens because no changes have been saved to a file and if you don’t notice the message, the PC may stay on waiting for confirmation.
How to prevent open tasks from preventing Windows shutdown?
Windows allows you to modify shutdown settings from the Registry Editor. So it is not necessary to install a third-party application. It is important that a backup is made before making any changes.
The change will only apply to your user account, so other users will keep the default Windows settings.
Enter Registry Editor from Windows Start. Press the Start or Windows key on the keyboard and then type Regedit, the Registry Editor application appears in the menu that you must run as administrator.
In the Registry Editor window look for the path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Desktop. Windows 10 users just have to copy the path and paste it into the Registry Editor’s address bar and it automatically positions you in the Desktop folder.
Right-click anywhere in the right pane of the Editor and select the New / String Value option. A new file is created at the end of the list of those already created and you must edit the name and place AutoEndTasks.
Double click on the file and change the Value data field to 1. Press the accept button to save the changes made.
Finally, restart the PC and from now on the applications will no longer be a problem for shutting down Windows. If for some reason you want to revert your changes, just go back to the same path in Registry Editor and change the AutoEndTasks value to 0.
Create a shortcut to shut down Windows
The Windows shutdown process can be slow, especially if the computer is several years old and has several applications running in the background. There is a simple way to add a shortcut to the desktop to shut down the system in any time we want.
On the desktop create a shortcut by right-clicking the mouse and selecting the New/Shortcut option.
Put a path of the application to be executed. In this case, the name of the Command Prompt executable file is placed with a command line that must be executed when it is opened: cmd.exe/c shutdown.exe -S -F -T 06 -C «The system will be shut down in 6 seconds »
In the previous line, the shutdown command is being executed, which indicates the shutdown of Windows. The value of T found in 06 indicates how long after executing the command the PC will turn off.
In this case, the value is 6 seconds, but it can be modified as you prefer. Like the text that is in quotation marks, it can be modified to display the message you want.
Put the name you want to the shortcut and to finish press the finish button. Every time you want to turn off the PC, you just have to double-click on the shortcut to execute the command.