Egg Timer

Sure enough all default features of Windows can easily be accessed, but you might need to use alternative ways, depending on the task at hand. Luckily, there are various third-party enhancements such as Egg Timer which help perform some functions like shutting down the computer at a specified time.

First of all, the application skips you the whole effort of pressing a few “next” buttons to deploy on your computer, which means it can run just as well directly from a thumb drive. Moreover, it doesn’t tie itself to any registry entries, so you can rest assured that the computer you use it on doesn’t have to suffer.

All it has to offer is found in a custom-made window. It’s pretty slim and intuitive, holding several adjustment sliders, and a large timer for which you can change the color from the options panel. The timer is easily adjusted by increasing or decreasing hours, minutes, and seconds through dedicated controls, because you can’t manually edit values directly.

The default option for when the timer reaches zero is to beep and bring up a custom message box. You can go ahead and choose from a couple more options, such as to shut down the computer, or play a WAV file from your computer. Sadly, there aren’t any other power options to choose from.

Hitting the start button puts the counter in motion. Although there’s no minimize button directly on the main window, the application does come with such an option. Unfortunately, it only minimizes to the taskbar, with no possibility to send it to the tray area. Only one timer can be configured per session.

All things considered, we can safely state that Egg Timer is a lightweight, practical application you can use to have the computer powered off after a custom amount of time so it doesn’t stay on if you fall asleep during a movie, or to simply display a custom message so you don’t miss appointments.