Its funny what you get used to

[swarfega]

I had to fix something on mums computer which runs XP, I couldnt find anything about restarting the computer so I looked at the options on the start menu and all there was was Log off and Turn off your computer.

So it was with some trepidation that I chose turn off your computer and sure enough a box came up with an option to restart. I can understand people getting confused and concerned at chosing turn off your computer. Its not the most obvious place to look for restart.

 

[garysgold]

Yea, the old way. W2K was like that too. An extra click to shutdown, a couple extra to reboot. I like the menu in Vista/Seven better.

Gary

 

[Barman58]

I always thought the confusion wasn't helped by having to press a button marked start to shut down

 

[Joan Archer]

I always thought the confusion wasn't helped by having to press a button marked start to shut down

Yes I think that caused a lot of shouting from people when they first saw that, perhaps Microsoft thought it was logical that you'd want to Start to Shutdown

 

[Barman58]

Hello Joan,

I think what it was was that they paid Mick Jagger so much to use "Start Me Up" for the promo of Windows 95 that they felt they had to keep it in XP to get their money's worth.

Maybe that's the real reason why XP's lasted so long, and it still pops up as the tooltip in 7

 

[swarfega]

Perhaps they should call it Home rather than Start.

 

[DocBrown]

I vaguely remember somebody created a Quick Shutdown Icon back for Win98!!

 

[johngalt]

You can easily create a quick shutdown icon for most versions of windows - it's pretty easy, as versions of windows based on NT used the executable shutdown.exe with parameters to select between shutdown and restart, and versions of windows not based on NT were able to do it through a shell menu item....

Ahh, here it is - http://www.aumha.org/win4/a/shutcut.php

 

[Beginning]

You can easily create a quick shutdown icon for most versions of windows - it's pretty easy, as versions of windows based on NT used the executable shutdown.exe with parameters to select between shutdown and restart, and versions of windows not based on NT were able to do it through a shell menu item....

Ahh, here it is - Shutdown & Restart Shortcuts

Very cool site.. I knew it was out there but couldn't for the life of me remember... Yup I've used some of those switches for years. Thanks for the link.

 

[Joan Archer]

Are you a member of AumHa as well John, you can pick up some good tips from them

 

[johngalt]

Been there a very long time

 

[jimbo45]

Actually not wishing to be "The 5th player in a String quartet" here but even with Windows 2000 and XP on a lot of machines if you hit the Power Off button it would do a proper shutdown without having to go through the menu.

Only if you HELD the power button on for about 5 secs (or maybe slightly longer) would it power off at once. (I'm talking about the Power button and not the System Reset one you see on some desktops / workstations).

Most of my current machines do this too -- I think anyway for laptops you can actually set this in the "power options".

I'm often to lazy to trawl through menus to find stuff anyway.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[johngalt]

It also depends upon how your BIOS is set - my BIOS is set to (by default) power down instantly instead of the 4 second wait period - I always make sure to change it to the 4 second wait period so it can make Windows do a correct shutdown if I need to.

 

[Joan Archer]

Been there a very long time

Me too since a few days after Jim set up the forum actually, I did have more posts than are showing though but a server glitch he had a while ago lost about 300 on my post count

 

[johngalt]

Lol - as for the forums, I may have like 2 posts there - _ just basically get the info from the pages without going to the forums.