Your Own Windows 10 Shutdown Icon

If you Google “Windows 10 shutdown icon”, Google’s suggestions will display “missing” as the first option to complete your search. Apparently, what people are most worried about when it comes to a shutdown icon in Windows 10 is the fact that it seems to be missing most of the time.  Indeed, a special shutdown icon can help to make your overall computer experience feel snappier. Especially when you place the icon on your taskbar, where it is always within reach, you seriously cut down the number of manipulations to shut down your machine. On single click of the mouse will do the job. What’s more, you can also create an icon to put your computer in sleep more or hibernate mode.

Normally, in Windows 10, to shut down your computer, you would first click the Windows start button in the bottom left corner, then select the power icon and then click the shutdown item from the power menu.

There definitely some room for improvement there.

Creating The Windows 10 Shutdown Icon

When you create your own Windows 10 shutdown icon on your Windows 10 taskbar, like in the image below, you can shut down your computer more quickly.

That’s not only because you have the shutdown icon always within reach, but you’ll quickly find how much more convenient shutting down your machine becomes if you eliminate the normal sequence of points and clicks through the Windows 10 start menu.

So let’s see how you can create such an icon.

To get started, right-click an empty space on your desktop and select “New” from the context menu and then select “shortcut”. (If you don’t know how to quickly get to your desktop, simply press the Windows-key + d on your keyboard).

In the new shortcut dialog, where it says “type the location of the item”, type

shutdown /s /t 0 (the final character is a zero).

Then click next to continue.

In the next screen, Windows wants to know what name you want to use for your Windows 10 shutdown icon. You can pick any name you like here if you’re more creative than me. In the example below I’ve simply put “Shutdown” as the name for my shutdown icon.

Next click finish to create the icon.

Windows will now display a shutdown icon on your desktop, which will shut down your computer if you double-click it.
You’ll notice that the shutdown icon that you just created looks rather ordinary, which is why I prefer to give it a better look.

To do so, right-click the icon and select properties from the context menu.

Then, in the shutdown icon properties window, click the “Change icon” button. (Ignore the message that says that the shortcut contains no icons and click the ok button to make it go away.)

Then, from the list of icons that appear, select an icon for your shutdown shortcut and click ok.

Click ok once more in the properties window to confirm your selection. Windows 10 immediately changes the look of your shutdown icon on your desktop according to your selection.

Put The Windows 10 Shutdown Icon On Your Taskbar

Another thing that you can do to increase the usefulness of your new icon is place it on your Windows taskbar. Having a Windows 10 shutdown icon always within reach on your taskbar really accelerates the shutdown sequence when powering off your pc. You should give it a try.

To put the icon on your taskbar, simply right-click the new icon on your desktop and select “Pin to taskbar” from the menu.

From now on, whenever you’re ready to shut down your computer, one click on your newly created icon on your taskbar will get the job done, swiftly and elegantly.

If you ask me, that beats the standard series of mouse movements and clicks needed in a regular Windows 10 configuration to shut down your machine.

Some readers have reported that, even though the Windows 10 shutdown icon doesn’t seem like a huge improvement over the normal shutdown procedure at first, they were still impressed by how easy and smooth the icon works for them. It just adds a little more elegance to the overall computer experience.

Please feel free to leave a short comment below and let me know what you think of the shutdown icon in the taskbar, I would appreciate it a lot!