How to schedule an automatic shutdown of computers and laptops without any software

Often a times we are so engaged mentally that we tend to leave our computers unattended to. This is more common with laptops than desktops. A good example could be, assume you are listening to music at night in bed on your laptop, the music gets so sweet that it soothes you away and off you slumper into deep sleep. The computer or laptop will keep singing until you wake up and this may be in the morning the following day. Another scenario could be that you are downloading a file and it is likely to take long before the download is done. Because you do not intent to inturrupt the download, you may chose to leave the computer unattended to and go about other chores. In this two examples, it would have been wise if we were to program the laptop or computer to shut down automatically at the exact
right time as deemed appropriate. Say for example, you are sure you want to listen to music for about one hour before you sleep and you are also almost certain that by that time you will be dozzing off, then all you have to do is set the automatic shutdown to one hour. In the succeeding example, if you are certain that the download will be complete after a certain period of time, say one hour too, then the we also need to set the automatic shutdown of the computer whe the download is done.

Here are the steps to follow to schedule an automatic shutdown of computers and laptops without any software;
It is key to first decide on the period you need to keep the laptop or computer on before the automatic shut down. In this tutorial however, we will use one hour for the purpose of illustrating, which translated to 3600seconds (60*60)

1. The first step is to create a shortcut on the desktop. Right click on the blank space on the desktop, point on new then click on shortcut.
2. In the pop up window that appears, type in SHUTDOWN -s -t 3600
   

3. Note that the 3600 in the above name represents the number of second in an hour. You can put your own desired seconds, be it 60, 200, 170 or any other numeral you can think of.
4. Click on Next.
5. Finally ckick on finish and you are done.
6. You will see a shortcut created on your desktop.
7. It is this short cut that you will use to schedule an automatic shutdown on your computer PC or laptop. 
8. To schedule a shutdown, just double click on the shortcut created.
9. The shortcut will work in accordance to the time period stated in step 2 above. If you wish the shutdown to come earlier or later than the duration set, all you have to do is to follow the steps above and create a new shortcut.

This trick works on all versions of windows including windows XP, windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, windows 8.1 and other operating systems.