Where I’m working now they have a policy of shutting down your computer at the end of the day (something about saving a tree).  Unfortunately I have a need to leave my PC on so I can access it from home in case of an emergency.  But I only need that access until 10 or so at night.  So I dug around and found I could indeed do this…

Shutdown
There are lots of posts around about how to shutdown Windows automatically.  There is a shutdown.exe in Windows but I tried that and had issues with it actually powering off the PC.  I didn’t really want to run an application so I eventually found PsShutdown.exe a utility from the old SysInternals (now owned by Microsoft).  So I simply created a batchfile and call this with the poweroff switch:

Usage: psshutdown [[\\computer[,computer[,..] | @file [-u user [-p psswd]]] -s|-r|-h|-d|-k|-a|-l|-o [-f] [-c] [-t nn|h:m] [-n s] [-v nn] [-e [u|p]:xx:yy] [-m "message"]

-k    Poweroff the computer (reboot if poweroff is not supported)

And call that script from a scheduled task.

Startup
So now when I come in I have to crawl under my desk to power on the PC. I’m far too lazy to do that so I dug around and discovered that most newer computer BIOS support an automatic power on option.

On my Dell it was under “Power Management”.  I turned it on, and also selected “weekdays only” and a time.  Now when I come in – my PC is on and ready to go!