Quick Shutdown

Quick Shutdown is a tiny application that allows you to customize your Windows shutdown, restart, log off, etc. procedures. This is great for those of you who get annoyed by the two or three unnecessary clicks it takes to do these tasks. Personally, this is one of the first applications to get installed on a computer for me.

Quick Shutdown has several cool little features. I’ll list the ones that I find particularly useful:

• The program icon resides in the system tray, and you can set double-clicking to do whatever shutdown procedure you prefer. I have mine set to shutdown (power off). So whenever I want to shutdown, I just double-click the icon and walk away. It’s beautiful.
• For all the other shutdown options like restart or log off, you can access the menu of them by right-clicking the icon. So, to restart, all I need is two clicks: right-click the icon, choose “Restart” and I’m done. You can see the right-click options in the picture below:
  
• Of course, you can also set hotkeys for all these things as well (see picture below):
  
  Funny story: I have my “Lock Workstation” hotkey as “Ctrl+Shift+Alt+L”. Mouser, the author of another program I use (LaunchBar Commander), has set that particular key combo as a secret debugging shortcut for his program. So, for a while, I was confused as to why my hotkey wasn’t working anymore and why it kept popping up the LaunchBar options. I thought that was funny, he was forced to change his secret combo. Reminded me of that Seinfeld scene where Kramer kept trying to hide his keys in Jerry’s apartment, and Jerry kept accidentally finding it. See mouser’s reaction:

  ctrl+shift+alt+l was my secret unchangeable emergency hotkey for bringing up the preferences if you otherwise lose the system tray icon and launchbars. i thought for sure no one would be insane enough to define that key for something else. obviously i was not considering the fact that superboyac was a user.. i’ll add in a winkey.

• You can change the system tray icon if you want to. I don’t like the default icon because it doesn’t remind me of anything to do with shutting down and is a little confusing when searching for the button in the tray (remember, this is all about efficiency!). That’s why I changed mine to the red shutdown button that is familiar to Windows XP.
  

There you go, another nifty little application!