Auto Shutdown Free

This is the free edition of Auto Shutdown, a feature-rich software application that enables you to schedule multiple power management options for your computer, including shutdown, lock, log off, restart, and standby.

The setup procedure is a fast and easy job that doesn't require special attention. Before launching Auto Shutdown, it's necessary to select the preferred UI languages to install definition files for.

At startup, the tool creates an icon in the taskbar notifications area for quickly accessing its options and configuration settings.

It's possible to enable an immediate power option or make it go off in 30 minutes, 1, 2, 4 or 8 hours when it comes to PC shutdown, restart, logoff, standby/sleep, or hibernate. Alternatively, you can power off the monitor with one click.

Power options can be scheduled to run at a specific time and date. They can be delayed or hurried, edited and removed from the list, and you can create as many scheduled jobs as you want.

What's more, you can ask Auto Shutdown to launch or terminate specific programs, as well as to open files using the same type of scheduled tasks with personalized settings. It can also clean up browser cookies, history and temporary files, together with the recent documents list, Recycle Bin and Windows temporary files.

We have encountered stability issues on both Windows 7 and 8.1 when running this program. Firstly, it started running multiple processes in the background that hogged system resources without asking for our permission beforehand. Secondly, it frequently hanged when trying to carry out simple commands, such as opening a panel. Thirdly, the audio tutorial was tricky to disable.

To be honest, we weren't at all impressed with this autoshutdown scheduler. Perhaps it will get improved with future updates.

NOTE: For additional features, you can check out Auto Shutdown Pro.