Shutdown

A tiny portable Windows tool that schedules a shutdown, restart or hibernate.
No more seconds math for shutdown /s /t 5400.

Features

• Shut down, restart or hibernate after a countdown (hours and minutes, quick picks from 15 minutes to 4 hours) or at an exact date and time.
• Always know what happens: the target time, a live countdown and the exact shutdown.exe command are shown.
• Cancel with one click whatever the app scheduled.
• Fits into Windows: English or German from the Windows display language, light or dark mode and the accent colour from your Windows settings.
• Portable and private: one small .exe (about 110 KB), no installer, no network access, no telemetry.

Download

1. Get Shutdown-<version>-windows.exe from the latest release.
2. Put it in any folder (rename it if you like) and run it.

Requires Windows 10 (version 1903 or newer) or Windows 11. The .NET Framework 4.8 it needs is already part of Windows.

The exe is not code signed, so Windows SmartScreen may warn before the first start. Click More info, then Run anyway. You can compare the file with SHA256SUMS.txt from the release:

certutil -hashfile Shutdown-<version>-windows.exe SHA256

How it works

Setting	What runs	Can the app be closed?
Shut down or restart, Force on	Windows itself: shutdown /s /f /t <seconds> (/r for restart)	Yes
Force off, or Hibernate	The app counts down, then runs the command with /t 0	No, keep it open

Windows always forces apps closed when a timeout is set, and it has no timer for hibernate. That is why those cases are timed by the app. Closing the window then asks first, and the PC is kept from going to sleep on its own until the time is up. Putting it to sleep by hand still pauses the countdown.

Starting the app a second time brings the open window to the front.

Files

Settings (Shutdown.settings.json) and a small log (rotated at 512 KB, one old copy kept) live in %APPDATA%\Shutdown. Nothing is written next to the exe. To remove the app, delete the exe and that folder.

Build from source

Requires the .NET SDK 8 or newer (it builds for .NET Framework 4.8 through reference assemblies).

build.bat

This builds dist\Shutdown.exe and starts it. Set NOSTART=1 to skip the start and NOPAUSE=1 to never wait for a key on errors.

release.bat builds the release files (dist\release\Shutdown-<version>-windows.exe and SHA256SUMS.txt).

Run the tests:

dotnet test tests\Shutdown.Tests

License

MIT © 2026 BGCoding