Interrupt Windows Shutdown

Interrupting Windows shutdown

Did you know that it is possible to interrupt Windows shutdown? Imagine that you accidentally clicked your shutdown button, and you need to stop this process and continue working with Windows. Well, this simple trick could save you some long Windows reboot sequence.

There is a Windows shutdown.exe command option that will stop any undergoing shutdown process. You just need to run the following command:

shutdown.exe -a

Of course, you should be very quick to type this command before the shutdown process is completed (it will work as long as your keyboard remains responsive during the shutdown process). In practice, that would be impossible. So your best option is to create a desktop or a keyboard shortcut to interrupt the Windows shutdown sequence, as we did with the fast Windows shutdown.

Notice that you won't be able to interrupt a Windows shutdown timer: you can just stop a standard, user-initiated Windows shutdown. If a computer virus kills any of your main Windows processes (such as Sasser virus did with lsass.exe), that would start a Windows shutdown countdown that cannot be interrupted. So the main utility of the interrupt Windows shutdown parameter is to prevent a situation of: "Oops! I didn't want to exit Windows yet!".