Windows 10 – Shutdown message with countdown and cancel

With such a heavy emphasis being placed on ‘green IT’ system administrators are now being asked to have all the company workstations shutdown at a set time.

This can be achieved through various methods including purchasing specalised products, but often there’s limited ability for end users to cancel or pause the shutdown. This adds a risk of a user still using the computer when the shutdown begins and loosing their work.

These HTA scripts are free and can be used to give a customised warning to users before their computers are automatically shutdown.

Shutdown HTA script – version 1

mb_shutdown

This version of Shutdown HTA features

  • A large cancel button and a 60 second countdown before the shutdown begins.
  • Improved countdown – now runs smoothly, says ‘minutes’ if there are 2 or more minutes remaining, says ‘minute’ if one minute remaining, and only says ‘seconds’ if in the last 60 second count down. A special thanks to Dave (see comments below) for helping improve the countdown.
  • When ran the window is placed on top of all open windows
  • When the 60 second count down sarts the window is placed on top of all open windows
  • plays a system beep when the HTA is ran
  • plays a system beep during the last 60 seconds of the count down

How to customise this script

  • change ‘var mins = 2.1;’ to the amount of minutes the countdown is required for
  • Change ‘<p><img src=”https://www.example.com/logo.png” /></p>’  to point to your company logo, or delete
  • to remove the system beep, delete beep(); from line 131
  • to have the system RESTART (rather than shutdown) change ‘objSystem.Win32Shutdown 5’ to ‘objSystem.Win32Shutdown 6’

How to implement this script

  1. Download using the link below.
  2. Customise the script as required.
  3. Schedule the script to run using the Windows Task Scheduler (or your other third party application).
  4. TIP: To implement this script you could have a copy on each workstation and have a local schedule call it, or you could create a server side script to psexec it on each workstation (calling the file from the server).

 

Need help adding the HTA application to a Windows 7 Scheduled Task? See: Windows 7 – Run Scheduled Task Interactively

 

Shutdown HTA script – version 2

Special thanks to Chris (see comments below) for this version of the shutdown HTA script.

ShutdownHTA2

This version does all above with the addition of being able to:

  • Delay for 24 hours
  • Delay for 15 minutes
  • Delay for 30 minutes
  • Delay for 60 minutes

As well as a different look and feel to the GUI.

Article Downloads

TIP: You may need to right-click and select 'save link as'.

Tagged in

71 comments on “Windows 10 – Shutdown message with countdown and cancel

  1. I’ve used this HTA files and it works great! One thing, how can I change the file so it displays minutes and seconds? I would like to use this file, but have it shut down in 10 minutes. I’ve replace 45 with 600, but having the system shutdown in 600 seconds may be difficult for my users to grasp.

    Can anyone help?

    Thank you in advance.

  2. Hi Cormac,

    The script was actually written for a Windows XP environment, it should still work.

    I included ‘Windows 7’ in the title for Search Engine Optimisation.

  3. Hi Doging7 –

    It’s really good to see someone making use of this script – hopefully we can figure out what’s going wrong here.

    I’ve re-tested the script on my Windows 7 x64 computer, first with Internet Explorer 8 as the default browser, then FireFox 5. Both times the script successfully ran and I was able to cancel using the provided ‘cancel’ button.

    Could you please explain in detail what you’re technical enviroment is (OS, Service Pack level, default browser etc).

    Also, when you press the Cancel button does the whole window close? Does the window stay open and the count down continue?

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *