Schedule your Computer to Turn off automatically when on Idle

The other night I started an Antivirus scan hoping that it would get completed before I sleep but it didn’t. I started feeling sleepy but I didn’t want to stop the scan so this is when it struck me to schedule my PC to shutdown automatically when the scan completes and goes on idle.

So if you are also looking for something like this, check out this default tool in our Windows system called as Task Scheduler.

Steps:

1. Open Task Scheduler app in your computer (search for task scheduler in the program menu).
2. Click Create Task on the right side panel.
3. In the window that opens, give it a name and configure the settings. Run with highest privileges and configure it for your own Windows version.
4. Go to Triggers tab and create a new trigger. Here you can schedule it run once, daily, monthly etc.
5. Go to Action tab, give it a name as Shutdown and arguments as /S (this will ensure to shutdown the system, and /S /F to forcefully shutdown). You also have the option to send an email and display a message box in this tab.
6. Next go to the Conditions tab, here you can select the Idle time when you want the task to run. Play around with around settings too to suit more to your needs.
7. Next is the Settings tab where you can look for more options and customize the scan.

Once set, the created task goes into the Task Scheduler library in case you need to edit or delete it.

That’s it; the task you just created will run automatically when your conditions are met and will shutdown the computer automatically at the specified time.

To watch the entire process, check out this video that I have created.