Irrevocable Power-Off 2.2

АвтоВыключалка компьютера. Завершает все процессы, гарантируя тем самым 100% выключение.

How to use: before starting with your computer activity decide when you want to finish. No matter what happens: you want to finish on time because you have to do other things in your life. Then you can use "Irrevocable Power-Off" to set yourself a deadline to finish your computer work. This will make you to organize better (and even be more productive). If you have not finished on time, it will power-off your computer and make easier to reconnect you to reality and say: "ok, that's enough, I'll finish tomorrow".

Recommended to: workers with flexible hours who lost in thoughts and forget going home early; tireless videogame players who disconnect from reality; charitable bosses that want they employees go home early; and anyone who find it useful... but auto-control would always be better.

General options: the time you want to shutdown (notice if you put a previous hour than current time it will be considered for tomorrow, except if it is less than 4 hours of difference that will be considered an error to avoid mistakes). You can also choose if you want to power-off (to force going home) or only reboot (force going lunch?), and if you want to force unsaved applications to close (this is dangerous because you can lose your unsaved data if you don't save on time, but forces you to finish with time enough as makes the deadline irrevocable). If you don't force applications to close, saved applications will close, some applications will ask to save only for a few seconds (and then close without saving), but some applications will stop the shutdown until you answer (and stop the shutdown if you answer cancel, like "Notepad").

The countdown: once you launch the process, it will appear a "system counter" in your system's language like this one:

This is a "system modal top-most" dialog that alerts you of the shutdown. This dialog belongs to the system, not to this utility, but it can be hidden and unhidden with the buttons of this utility. The system keeps the dialog over all other windows, so if you are setting the deadline a few hours later you may want to hide the window to don't get bothered by it. Near the deadline you may want to show the counter again. When you lock the system ([Win]+L) or you go to the welcome screen, the system shows again the window even if it was hidden. To avoid that you can use the option "Counter out of screen" to cloak the counter window, but be careful to don't forget the deadline is still there... The recommended option is "No top-most counter", that makes the window not to be always on top of all other windows but you can still see it whenever you want.

Is it really irrevocable?: even if you know how to kill application processes with "Task Administrator" to stop standard timer applications, you cannot stop "Irrevocable Power-Off". This program is not resident in memory, it only launches a system counter that uses "Winlogon.exe" process. As it is a "critical system process" it cannot be terminated:

Anyway a programmer could call a special operating system function to stop the countdown. It would be easy to program an utility to revoke the shutdown, but you would need that special utility to stop this one. The operating system doesn't have any way to stop "Irrevocable Power-Off". Even with this utility you cannot lauch it again with a different deadline to gain time: the status line will show "Cannot be launched".

Remote computers: to use this utility on remote computers of local network the current user needs network administrator privileges. Use this option very carefully because you may shutdown a computer with unsaved applications. Other people can lose their unsaved data if they don't save on time and you would be the responsible for that. You have to put the list of computers (use "\\computer") of your network to shutdown sepparated with "," or ";" before launch (example: \\computer1 , \\computer2 , localhost ,...). You may use "Net search" to search for computers on your local network, and "+" button to add them to the shutdown list. Use "-" button to put them in the exception list (so you do not shutdown the servers of your network). Charitable bosses may use "Everybody go home" button to add all searched computers to the shutdown list (this is also a good way to make sure nobody is working 5 minutes before closing the office in the everyday schedule).


Link (~224Kb):
http://utilities.prot...lePowerOff.zip