How to: Stop a Windows shutdown

We’ve all been there. In fact, I was there just yesterday, happily pressing “next, next” in a long installation process. Just a microsecond too late, however, I realized I had accidentally told the program to restart my system. Unsaved documents, half-finished reviews and long strings of tabs disappeared before my eyes. I looked frantically around for some way of stopping it, a big red button perhaps, or a giant STOP lever. Of course, there wasn’t one. To make sure you don’t fall victim to the same problem, I’m going to show you how to stop an unwanted system shutdown or restart.

The easiest way is to create an abort shutdown/restart shortcut. To do this, right click on the desktop and select New > Shortcut. In the box that appears, type shutdown.exe -a. Then call the shortcut whatever you like, and place it somewhere easy to access- in the taskbar if you like. The next time you accidentally tell your computer to shut down or restart, double click the shortcut and you’ll prevent the restart. Just don’t be too trigger-happy with the “Nexts” next time!