Auto shutdown at night

[MordyT]

So like all, we like our PCs to shutdown at night.
Mostly so that students get off the machines and get to bed.

We setup logon times, but if a PC is already logged in, they don't get booted (well, they lose their network shares, but solitaire is so much fun I guess).
So, we want our PCs to reboot nightly, at the shutdown time. Then they won't be able to login until the next day.

Students are always looking for ways around the system , including hanging a process to stop a log off.
To prevent this, we issue a PsShutdown -r -f -t 0 which works much better then shutdown -f -r -t 0... hung processes actually die as they are supposed to. Then just to make sure they really go down, we have a PsKill winlogon run 5 minutes later... very very effective btw.

On Windows XP we could always include a message and countdown timer (using -m "message" and -t 300) so that users would be forewarned and could save. On windows 7 64 bit, this no longer works. Research had lead me to session ids being the issue, and short of using PsExec to run the command (and specify the session id) there is no way of giving either the timer or the message.
I
got around the message issue but just using msg.exe to broadcast messages 5 minutes before, but I am really looking for a nicer solution.

td;tr I need a way to display a countdown message and timer before a scheduled reboot. Looking for a nice way of doing this, preferable without too many 3rd party apps.

I have seen this app in use and cannot find it anywhere, basically it gave a pop up that could not be closed unless you pressed ctrl+shift+alt+7 or some wacky combination that had both a timer and a message. This could work if I could figure out what it is.

[DaveP]

I use Shutdownertron [Link 1: powarrmonkey proudly presents... on our network. However after moving to Windows 7 some Edugeekers have found the performance of Shutdownertron to be unsatisfactory [Particularly with regard to the message to users still logged on. I have found it works OK here]

Have a look at these threads that discuss Shutdownertron as they also discuss alternatives:

Link 2: Shutdown Policy

Link 3: Timed Shutdown

Link 4: Multi-Schedule Shutdown / Classroom Control

Link 5: Hibernate/Resume You Computer According To Set Rules

[MordyT]

I think that just about answers my question then. Lots of options, although I still don't see one like I saw before...

Thanks for the help.

[kcymer]

+1 for Shutdownertron, great piece of software, simple to use and works

[Davit2005]

Another one here for shutdownertron. Deployable by MSI and group policy templates.

[british_government]

We just have a GPO which creates a scheduled task to shutdown the machine's if they are idol, works perfectly

[MordyT]

Thank you all for your helpful replies.
between poweroff and impero, I think we got this handled.
We are still testing shutdownertron as a alternative too.

[russdev]

Thank you all for your helpful replies.
between poweroff and impero, I think we got this handled.
We are still testing shutdownertron as a alternative too.

Hopefully the power management window should have everything you need if not through do let me know what is missing..

Russell

[edutech4schools]

Just out of interest what did you go with.

[MordyT]

We ended up with the following:
Impero attempts a shutdown.

5 minutes later a custom script (calls pskill and kills winlogon) is called via scheduled task. This will, without fail, no matter what, log the person off.

Done,