offlater

There’s a pretty high chance you fall asleep at night during your favorite movie or show, while your computer remains active and uses power for no reason. Windows doesn’t really let you schedule shutdown operations, but there are applications out there specialized in this regard, and offlater is a suitable example here.

Before you can check what the application can do for you, it’s a good idea to make sure that your computer is fitted with .NET Framework. Although you’re taken through a setup process, offlater doesn’t bind itself to registry entries, so it’s possible to deploy it on a thumb drive to use on other computers besides your own.

All the application has to offer is found in a clean environment. The whole operation is pretty straightforward, and doesn’t take more than a couple of seconds to define. Note, however, that once you apply all changes, the process can’t be canceled, unless you bring up the Task Manager and manually close the corresponding process.

The entire process is straightforward by all means. The timer is specified in minutes, and you can set a maximum value with three digits, which means some calculus needs to be performed for long-term operations. More than that, the application can only perform a shutdown operation, with no other configurable power options.

Be sure to have all your work saved by the time your computer is scheduled to power off, just to prevent losing any important tasks. In case it’s the right thing for you, a handy trick is to assign a custom hotkey command to the application’s shortcut from the Properties panel.

To sum it up, offlater isn’t really prepared to deliver a proper method of scheduling shutdown operations for your computer, even though it does so in the end. The configurable time field leaves much to be desired, and it’s pretty much a shame that you can’t select a different power option than shutdown.