5 Ways to Quickly Shutdown or Reboot Your Computer in a Few Seconds

While computers are faster these days, there’s a couple of areas in Windows where you can notice and get frustrated by the distinct lack of speed. They are during startup of the computer and then also shutdown or rebooting the computer. The latter of shutting the computer down can be especially annoying because a piece of software or a driver can cause the the computer to take several seconds or minutes to power off, or even hang the computer completely while attempting to shutdown. It’s then that you might have to reach for the reset or power button which will produce an improper shutdown.

If you’re having the shutdown or reboot slowdown issue, the last thing you want to have to do is sit there for ages and wait for the process to finish before you can troubleshoot or try out a potential fix. A workaround to speed things up and get your computer to reboot or shutdown a lot faster, no matter how long it currently takes, is to use a utility designed to perform the task almost instantaneously. Such tools do actually exist and can be a great time saver if you are affected by this problem. Here we look at a few tools that can help accomplish this. As a very simple test, we timed a standard shutdown of our Windows 7 test machine at 34 seconds, and then timed each program below to see how fast or slow it performed the shutdown. All tools below apart from the last one work on Windows XP and newer operating systems.

1. SuperFast Shutdown

From the creator of XP Smoker, SuperFast Shutdown is a simple tool which can make your computer shutdown almost instantly. After installation, the program creates 2 shortcuts on the desktop, simply run the given shortcut (SuperFast Reboot or SuperFast Shutdown) to either reboot or shutdown your computer. It’s as easy as that, there are no configuration options and also no confirmation boxes or anything. You have to make sure any opened programs have saved their data as you won’t get a chance to do anything once executed. SuperFast Shutdown managed to shut our test computer down in 5 seconds.

Download SuperFast Shutdown

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2. Super Quick Shutdown 

There are quite a few useful options to perform a fast power off in Super quick Shutdown. Firstly it can produce 3 types of reboot, shutdown or logoff, which are normal, force and quick. You can easily use one of the options from the Base tab in the program. Another useful function is the option to perform a shutdown or reboot via a Ctrl+Alt+{custom key} shortcut combination (the program needs to run in the background for this). Any of the shutdown functions can also be turned into a desktop shortcut from the appropriate tab, just select what shortcut(s) to create and press the button. It was able to shut our test PC down in 5 seconds, but watch out for adware during install.

Download Super quick Shutdown

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3. Fast Shutdown

The one major disappointment of Fast Shutdown is the several screens of adware you have to decline on install, although you can easily bypass this and make a portable version at the same time by extracting the installer with 7-Zip. The program does also have 2 different shutdown functions, Fast Shutdown being the standard option and is supposed to power off the computer in 3 seconds. The Instant option is designed to be almost instantaneous but during testing we noticed no difference in speed between the two. There is also a developer version on the website which has command line arguments. In our test, both Fast and Instant shut the computer down in around 3 seconds.

Download Fast Shutdown

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4. Shutti Shutdown Booster

Shutti is a little different from other tools because in addition to being able to shut your computer down very quickly, it can also help improve your standard shutdown speed. It does this by changing a few system registry settings which help control the timeout speed of applications and services and hung applications during the shutdown process. The Fast shutdown button is a small button at the bottom and it will popup a Yes/No dialog warning window and then quickly power off the PC. The program is portable and requires .NET v3 or higher. Shutti Shutdown Booster powered down our system in 4 seconds.

Download Shutti Shutdown Booster

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5. Windows XP Task Manager

For those of you out there still using Windows XP, there’s a less well known way to quickly shutdown your computer similar to the tools above, but this method is handled entirely from Windows Task Manager and doesn’t need third party tools or scripts. All you have to do is open Task Manager via Ctrl+Alt+Del or right clicking on the taskbar, go to the Shut Down menu, hold Ctrl down and then click “Turn Off”.

The computer will then shutdown in no time at all, on our test Windows XP, the computer was powered off in about 2 seconds!

Warning: The way these tools perform a faster shutdown is by short-cutting most of the procedures that a standard Windows shutdown would go through, such as safely closing applications and services. As such, there is always a risk that you could lose currently open files or data corruption could occur. These tools are best used to help troubleshoot abnormally slow or hanging shutdowns but if you intend to use one more often, make sure you at least close down all running programs first to reduce the chance of problems.