Create Shutdown / Restart / Lock Icons in Windows 7 or Vista

Many people don’t like the new Windows Vista shutdown menu, because nobody wants to mess with that stupid popup menu. So we can create icons that will let us shutdown, restart or lock our computer. While Windows 7 have a better and faster shutdown procedure but we can also use this procedure to create shortcut and then a hotkey to do this.

Of course the first step is to right-click on the desktop and choose New and then select Shortcut. It will ask for the location of the path which will help to do the following functions as needed.

1.    Shutdown: When we’ll enter the command Shutdown.exe –s –t 00  in the shortcut location bar, so that when we open that shortcut, windows will shutdown immediately.
2.    Restart: Now if we’ll enter the command Shutdown.exe –r –t 00 in the shortcut path, and when we open this shortcut, windows will restart.
3.    Lock Computer: We’ll enter the command Rundll32.exe User32.dll, LockWorkStation in the shortcut location bar to lock the windows instantly.
4.    Hibernate: To hibernate our computer we’ll create a new shortcut by entering the following path rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll,SetSuspendState
5.    Sleep: When we want to make our computer sleep and make a shortcut for it we’ll enter rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState 0,1,0

After adding any one of the command from above, the next window will come and ask the name of the shortcut so we’ll name it according to its function. Like if we’ve added the command for shutdown, we’ll name the icon by Shutdown Icon. Now we’ll click finish in the last step and our icons to shutdown, restart, lock, hibernate and sleep are created and they can be opened immediately.

We can change the icon images by right-clicking them and choose properties and then Change the Icon tab so that we can browse from the icons you’ve downloaded.