Has it ever irritated you that when you want to shut down your PC, you have to go to the "Start" menu? Well I found an easy way to make a shutdown button which sits on the desktop along with a "reboot" button and an "abort" button which cancels the shutdown or reboot if you change your mind.

Just follow the instructions here. Normally I would post screenshots but since I use a German computer, I figured it was pretty useless showing German language screenshots if you don't know German. But I think the following instructions are clear enough :

1) Right-click on the desktop and choose New then Shortcut.
2) When the box comes up, browse to the file C:\Windows\System32\Shutdown.exe, click Next, name the shortcut, and click Finish.
3) Now right-click on your new shortcut and choose Properties. In the Target box (the box which shows the location of the Shutdown.exe program), attach one of the following commands at the end : -l (to log off), -s (to shut down), or -r (to reboot).

If you also add the command -t xx (where xx is a number of seconds), your shutdown procedure will display a warning and countdown before activating. I chose 10 seconds which is more than enough time.

You can also specify a comment to be displayed with the warning by adding the command -c "Your text". This is quite amusing as you can give yourself a personalised shutdown message such as "Goodbye Mark!"

Once the shutdown / reboot button is activated, the only way to stop the computer from shutting down / rebooting is to launch the shutdown program again with the -a (for abort) command in the target box of the shortcut. So it would be best to repeat the above process and also make an "abort" button for your desktop too.

I even gave my new buttons nice South Park icons :