I started to get quite annoyed today when I arrived at work and found my computer still on. Usually the person that leaves last, takes care of turning off all the computers, closing the windows and all the rest. But it's human to forget and here comes a simple solution to take care of this problem. Windows XP (I think this feature was included from Windows 98) comes with a task scheduler that allows users to set various activities that will be performed daily, weekly, monthly - at specific times. But Windows XP also comes with a nifty Unix-like utility shutdown.exe - but since it's not very advertised, there are a lot of shareware programs that claim to have the same functionality, yet for a small price.

Here are the parameters that I used for shutdown.exe:

    shutdown -t 60 -s -c "You're working too much, go home!"

For some odd reasons, task scheduler refuses to run a task with the privileges of a user with no password set. The workaround is to run the task as the `system` user, which means NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. Very peculiar if you ask me.