How to Shutdown or Restart Your Computer When You Can’t Access the Start Menu or the Shutdown dialog

If you’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of trying to shutdown or restart your computer when when your Start menu or taskbar are unresponsive…it can be daunting. One obvious way to to shut down is to simply power off your computer, but that may result in unexpected problems.

There’s another, better way to shutdown your computer without using the Start menu or Shutdown/Restart dialog, and it’s very easy to do.

Just press the Windows Key plus the R key to open a Run Dialog

In the Run dialog:

To shutdown your computer type SHUTDOWN and press enter.

To restart your computer type SHUTDOWN /R and press enter (Please note the space between SHUTDOWN and the slash.)

So the next time you cannot shut your computer down the way you normally do, you’ll have another option besides powering off your computer.

This tip works in Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

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