shutdown

Federal Web sites may go dark in shutdown

Many federal Web sites will go dark if the government shuts down tomorrow night, the White House indicated this afternoon.

A 16-page memo (PDF) to federal agencies says their Web sites may stay online only in a small number of situations, including tax collection and handling "exempted" activities such as payments and other functions that are paid for by previous annual budgets.

"The mere benefit of continued access by the public to information about the agency's activities would not warrant the retention of personnel or the obligation of funds to maintain, or update, the agency's … Read more

Auto shutdown tool

WinMend Auto Shutdown is a free tool that will shut down your Windows PC at a scheduled time. It can also place your PC in hibernation or standby mode, or log you off when it's unattended. You can use Scheduled Tasks to do all that in Windows, but it's a complex and time-consuming process. That's where Auto Shutdown shines: it's easy enough for anyone to use.

WinMend Auto Shutdown normally runs in the background; clicking the program's system tray icon let us show the main view as well as restart or shut down our PC … Read more

Performing a hard shutdown on a Mac

It is always preferred to shut a Mac down or restart it by using the options in the Apple menu. This allows services to be stopped, settings and documents to be saved, and hardware to be cleanly unmounted and put in a state where it's ready to be shut off. However, there are times when a hard reset may be necessary, which besides obvious kernel panics, includes system freezes and hangs. These are generally characterized by the following behaviors:

Kernel panics: When these happen, the screen darkens and instructs you to press and hold the power button.

System freezes: … Read more

Shutdown simplicity

Leaving your computer running all the time isn't good for its performance or for your electric bill. Sometimes, though, you don't want to sit around waiting for a large download to finish so that you can turn off your computer before you leave or go to bed. Auto Shutdown - InBasic is a Firefox add-on that will automatically shut down your computer when your downloads are complete, provided you're using Firefox's download manager.

The extension installs easily, and once we'd made the required restart of Firefox, it appeared as a small power button icon in … Read more

Random shutoff results in 'shutdown cause' error

Though the OS X operating system is very robust at handling software-related crashes and hangs, there are times when a problem may be beyond the scope of the operating system's abilities to manage and the system can either crash or freeze. When this happens, the system may show some clue in the system console, but likely it may only be a brief but repeating message that mentions something like the following:

Dec 20 13:33:23 localhost kernel: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = 3

What is happening here is the system's power manager (called the Power Management Unit or &… Read more

Yahoo slashing products like Delicious, MyBlogLog

Layoffs apparently aren't the only thing Yahoo is doing to slim down size and cut expenses: A screenshot from a company Webcast began circulating Thursday that claims the company will be shutting down Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, Delicious, AllTheWeb.com, Yahoo Picks, and AltaVista; as well as merging and consolidating a handful of other products like geolocation service Fire Eagle and event listing site Upcoming.

The screenshot was originally posted to Twitter by Eric Marcoullier, a former Yahoo employee who had been the founder of MyBlogLog, a Yahoo acquisition that will now be shuttered.

"Part of our organizational streamlining … Read more

Shutdown Scheduler

Easy Pro ShutDown from Hi-SooFT automates the shutdown, restart, or hibernate process for a Windows computer. It's a small free utility that's compatible with Windows versions from 95 to 7.

Easy Pro ShutDown runs as soon as you click its executable file, with no need to install anything, a fact that also makes it portable. Its user interface is a simple dialog that lets you select Shutdown, Restart, or Hibernation and specify the event in a 24-hour clock display by hours, minutes, and seconds, presumably local time since there's no option for international time zones. There are … Read more

India threatens to shut down BlackBerry service

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has until August 31 to satisfy India's security concerns or get booted out of the country.

India's government is the latest in a long list of national governments that have recently threatened to shut down BlackBerry services over security issues. The United Arab Emirates has said it will halt Blackberry Messenger, e-mail, and Web browsing starting October 11. Indonesia and Saudi Arabia also threatened to block BlackBerry Messenger service. Saudi Arabia reached a deal with RIM over the weekend, and a ban that was to go into effect starting Monday was lifted.

Meanwhile, … Read more

How to fix your McAfee-crippled computer

McAfee pushed out a malformed security patch early on Wednesday that wound up crippling computers running Windows XP, but there is a fix available. Users should note that it's labor-intensive and must be applied manually to each computer. If you're running Windows Vista or Windows 7, your computer shouldn't be affected by the bad update.

If your computer is shutting down automatically, you must address that before you can fix anything else.

Step 1: Open a command prompt: Start menu, Run, then type cmd and hit Enter Step 2: Type shutdown -a, which will prevent the shutdown … Read more