Televisions often have a timer built in that will allow you to fall asleep watching TV and have the TV shut itself off after awhile. Delayed Shutdown (free) works along the same concept. Set up a timer of any length and hit Start, and after the timer counts down, the PC will shut off.
This allows you to safely put on some music and sleep in the office without having to worry about your power bill. Or, if your PC is performing a critical task and you’re leaving the house, give Delayed Shutdown plenty of time for the task to complete, then have it shut the whole thing down. For those sharing a single PC among many, Delayed Shutdown is also a way to ensure that the next person can’t access any of your files.
Note that if there are any windows open when Delayed Shutdown finishes its visual countdown (no audio include), it won’t prompt you to save any of them; it’ll force quit out of everything and go straight to shutdown. Also, you can stop the shutdown before the countdown is finished, but nothing you can do will prevent it from happening after that, even clicking “cancel” on a save prompt. Every app is given a few seconds to save, and then it’s gone, and the system then shuts down. Be sure and save everything open before using Delayed Shutdown.
That said, Delayed Shutdown does its job well and doesn’t get hung up by anything. It says it will shut down, and it will. Therefore, anyone needing a delayed system shutdown for any reason should take advantage of this free utility.