Most people would likely say that their work computer isn’t fast enough, but then which computer is. I am not actually unsatisfied, my laptop is good enough for compiling, using secure shell, mail and word processing. The company actually does have a pretty good VPN setup to allow me to work remotely.
Despite the fact that everything works well, I do have one very tiny little complaint.
The only problem is that I cannot properly shutdown when I am working remotely, it just hangs. I have tried to shut it down by briefly pressing the power button sometimes that helps, sometimes it causes the computer to hibernate.
It is a bit difficult to get this corrected by IT as it only happens when I am connecting remotely. When I am at the office and IT looks at it, it never misbehaves. I had someone from IT look into this and they cannot find any reason why my laptop cannot shutdown.
I used to simply power the computer off without shutting down at all.
Command line to the rescue
Windows actually provides the shutdown.exe command which actually works much better than selecting shutdown from the start button.
| option | description |
| /s | Schedules a shutdown of the computer after a few minutes. |
| /r | Shuts down the computer and then does a restart. |
| /a | Aborts the current scheduled shutdown |
| /f | Force applications to stop without informing the user. |
It isn’t the shutdown command itself that is so powerful but the force option. I suspect that the software that was used to build the vpn is the problem despite having terminated the connection.
I don’t want to let windows make all of the decisions, I close all of the applications that I am using but now I can call shutdown to gracefully power down.
shutdown.exe /s /f
