In this Windows 8 Tutorial I show you how to create Quick Power Shortcuts on the Metro Start Screen that allow you to instantly shutdown, restart, log off or lock your Windows 8 PC.
Video Transcript Below:
How To Create Windows 8 Power Shortcuts on the Metro Start Screen
Hey everybody, Randy McKown here. Windows 8 has been out for awhile now and it seems a lot of people are really unhappy about how there’s no quick, easy way to do something so simple like turning their computer off. So in this video Im going to walk you through the process of creating a set of power shortcuts that will allow you to do things like instantly like shut down, log off, restart or even lock your Windows 8 machine with one click, right from the start menu.
First thing you need to do is head to the desktop. You’re going to create a new shortcut by right clicking on the Windows desktop and selecting New .. Shortcut. The first one is going to be an Abort Shutdown so type shutdown -a
Click the Next Button and we’re going to call this one Abort.
The first thing you’ll notice is the Windows 8 icon sucks. So right click, come down to Properties and we’re going to Change Icon. Ignore this by clicking the ok button and we’re going to replace shell32.dll with imageres.dll
Im going to scroll over until I find a nice icon for my Abort button. This one works. Click OK. Click OK Again. Now we have a more appropriate icon for our Windows 8 Abort button. If you had trouble finding the imageres.dll for any reason, I’ll put the exact text below this video on both my website and on youtube so you can double check the spelling and make sure everything was right.
Ok, next we’ll create the actual Shutdown button using the same process. Right click on the windows 8 desktop, select New, Shortcut. Here you’re going to type shutdown -s
and this one will be called Shutdown
Again we need to give this an icon that better represents the power shortcut. We right click. Come down to Properties. We want to change the icon, ignore our little popup and again we’ll replace shell32.dll with imageres.dll
Scroll over until you find a nice icon for your Shutdown button. Click OK and click OK again.
Now lets look at how the Windows 8 Shutdown actually works. We get a warning letting us know that Windows 8 is about to shutdown. Now, I don’t want to shutdown so I’m going to use my Abort Shortcut and you can see in the task bar that its been cancelled.
The next shortcut is a bit different. We’re going to create a restart button which unlike the shutdown it doesn’t give a warning message and it restarts instantly. shutdown -r
Now we can set a delay by using -t followed by a space and the amount of time. I’m using 10 seconds. We can also give ourselves a little reminder with -c space and the message in parenthesis. I’m going to use Please Save Your Work.
I’m going to call this one Restart and I’ve already showed you how to change the icon twice so I’m not going to repeat that again. Ok, let’s test out the Windows 8 restart shortcut. There’s my little comment to myself reminding me to save my work and Windows 8 will wait 10 seconds before restarting but Im going to abort.
The next power control shortcut is going to be a log off button and we’re going to enter shutdown -l
I’ll call this one Log Off and then I’ll skip ahead to the next one because you already know how to change the icon. This next one is going to be completely different from the others so pay attention. We’re going to create a lock button, which takes you to the Windows 8 lock screen. As always I’ll include this code in the text below the video on my website and on youtube so you can easily copy paste it.
rundll32.exe User32.dll,LockWorkStation
Make sure that you capitalized this just like I’ve done here or its not going to work. Ok now we want to add these to our start menu by right clicking on each one and selecting Pin To Start. Once you have all this done head to your start menu.
The Windows 8 start menu can start looking sloppy really fast so we need to organize our new controls. Let’s throw these into a new little area by dragging them over here and then after that we’ll go ahead and give it a name. Click on the minus button and we’ll drag our power group over here where it can be accessed quicker. Now right click your group. Click Name Group and we’ll call this Power Control. You can name your group whatever you want. Power Control jut makes sense. There we have it .. now if I want to Lock my screen really fast .. there it is.
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