One of the keyboard routines I adopted in XP was for shutting down or restarting. I’d simply press the 
then “U” would open the Shutdown command, and “R” would select Restart (or I could use the arrows to move to shutdown if needed), then “Enter” would enact it. I was so disappointed when I found I could no longer do that in Vista! Well, I got nice surprise today when Angie posted a tip on how to use the old Shutdown command. After playing with it I found it didn’t always work perfect, but I found a tweak to make it do what I wanted. Here’s how to do it:
- When you’re ready to restart or shutdown, if you have any windows open press + D which will take you to your desktop. If you don’t have any other windows open, you can skip this step.
- Press the ALT key and while holding it down, press F4, this will close the active item, or exit the active program, which is why we had to get to the desktop first, otherwise it would just close whatever window you were in. You could also just keep pressing ALT+F4 until all your windows are closed, but if you work like me, that could be a lot of times.
- With the Shut Down Windows window open, type
Rif you want to restart,Sif you want to switch users or shutdown (each time you type it it toggles between the two), orLto logoff. I’m going to restart, so of course I typeR(not cap sensitive).
- Finally, press Enter to activate the OK button, which will restart, shutdown, switch user, or logoff.
So, +D then ALT+F4 then R then Enter will restart your Vista machine, a few more keys than in XP, but at least it’s still an option.
Tags: keyboard, Restart, Shut Down