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.

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

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

  1. Hi JC – Try right-clicking then selecting ‘Save Target As’ or ‘Save Link As’.

    I had the same issue with Firefox, perhaps Firefox doesn’t allow downloading HTA’s anymore?

  2. Jason, Unfortunately I do not have a solution for the the scenario you’ve presented. The only way I know for sure to have the shutdown.hta to display to the end users is to call it remotely using psexec. It would be great if there was a way to use a scheduled task to do this but I’m not sure how to do that.

  3. First of all, thanks for the swift response and the assistance.

    Dave, if you could give me some assistance with that I would appreciate it. Many of the machines I am planning to deploy this to are sporadically on and off our network and need to be restarted just the same.

    What I am attempting to create is a solution that allows me to place a folder and files and schedule a task on the local machine which will give the same experience whether the user is on or off the network. I would prefer to avoid using Group Policy because 1. ours is already very cluttered, and 2. because I don’t have the authority to make those sort of changes. Honestly I am a desktop support guy who was given this task once I discovered that our users did not restart their machines regularly. Extended uptime causes a litany of problems on our network, but the users still can’t be trusted to restart their own machines. My manager believes this is a simple solution that can be handled with an app on the local machine – which he charged me with researching/building. I can see how it could work, and I have been successful in creating excatly what we needed for our Win XP users, but it appears that security changes in Win 7 are keeping the same solution from working.

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