Shortcuts to Restart, Hibernate, Standby or Shutdown Your Computer

Here’s a tip that might be handy for those using Windows 8 or most other recent versions of Windows.

If using the charms bar in Windows 8 makes your head explode then you might fancy creating a shortcut to restart, hibernate, standby or shutdown your computer. It’s very easy to do as follows:

1. Right click on a blank space on the desktop,
2. Select New then Shortcut,
3. In the new window that appears copy and paste one of the following to restart, hibernate, standby, shutdown or log off respectively:
   1. %windir%\System32\shutdown.exe –r
   2. %windir%\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Hibernate
   3. %windir%\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Standby
   4. %windir%\System32\shutdown.exe –s
   5. %windir%\System32\shutdown.exe –l
4. Click Next,
5. Give the shortcut a meaningful name (something corresponding to the function might be helpful like Restart or Shutdown,
6. Click Finish.

Your new shortcut should now appear on the desktop and you can also pin it to the Start Screen or taskbar for easy access.