Windows 7 : Enabling the Shutdown Event Tracker

When you select Start, Shut Down, Windows 7 proceeds to shut down without any more input from you (unless any running programs have documents with unsaved changes). That’s usually a good thing, but you might want to keep track of why you shut down or restart Windows 7, or why the system itself initiates a shutdown or restart. To do that, you can enable a feature called Shutdown Event Tracker. With this feature, you can document the shutdown event by specifying whether it is planned or unplanned, selecting a reason for the shutdown, and adding a comment that describes the shutdown.

Here are the steps to follow to use a group policy to enable the Shutdown Event Tracker feature:

Now when you select Start, Shut Down, you see the Shut Down Windows dialog box shown in Figure 1. The Shutdown Event Tracker group gives you three new controls to operate:

• Planned— Leave this check box activated if this is a planned shutdown. If you didn’t plan on shutting down Windows 7 (for example, you’re restarting because a program has crashed or because the system appears unstable), deactivate this check box.

• Option— Use this list to select the reason for the shutdown. (Note that the items you see in this list change depending on the state of the Planned check box.)

• Comment— Use this text box to describe the shutdown event. If you choose either Other (Planned) or Other (Unplanned) in the Option list, you must add a comment to enable the OK button; for all other items in the Option list, the comment text is optional.

To enable the Shutdown Event Tracker on systems without the Local Group Policy Editor, open the Registry Editor and dig down to the following key:

HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Reliability

Change the value of the following two settings to 1:

ShutdownReasonOn
ShutdownReasonUI