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Windows 10 does not always shutdown because "an app is preventing you from shutting down". Is there a setting to force shutdown regardless of "potential save loss"? I don't care if I lose work. This has become a problem for me because sometimes I stand up and walk away, and I come back 3 hours later and my computer is still on...

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    Please understand that for a decade, Windows had a reputation for hanging on shutdown. This dialog is designed to prevent those hangs from happening, by having the user fix the underlying issue.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 23:18

2 Answers 2

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Create a shortcut, for example on your Desktop, to the command

shutdown /t 30 /s

and name it something description such as "Shutdown in 30 seconds".

As you'd expect, double-click the shortcut to run it. Your machine will shutdown after 30 seconds. Head to START and type shutdown /a if you didn't intend to do that!

Another useful shortcut is for a restart,

shutdown /t 30 /r

You can adjust the timeout up or down from 30 seconds as you like. (It must be non-zero; I tend to use 10 seconds as my "do it now" value.)

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    Works for me. on Windows 10, 20H2. Going the GUI route triggers the warning page with the inevitable abandonment of shutdown. Going the CLI route gets what I want. My test rig was a clean start of Word, editing a document (without autosave), and then triggering shutdown
    – Chris Davies
    Commented Feb 26, 2021 at 0:19
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    I have good reasons for using this. I would imagine the OP does, too
    – Chris Davies
    Commented Feb 26, 2021 at 0:34
  • @roaima I've been messing with PowerShells Stop-Computer and there's a -Force parameter
    – Kellen Stuart
    Commented Feb 26, 2021 at 1:30
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You can create a registry value which will instruct Windows to automatically kill tasks on shutdown.

Open regedit and navigate to Computer\HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop.

Right click in the right pane and create a new string key. Name the new key AutoEndTasks.

Double click on the newly created key and give it a value of 1.

Now Windows will close your apps automatically and shutdown.

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