ComputerAnt Blog

I looked at MS and other solutions for a way to save on the power bills and to get the computers to shut down at night. I couldn’t find anything that could fulfill my needs. Using AutoIT I wrote a Shutdown program. I called it ShutITdown.exe.

My Needs

What I did not want to do is shutdown the computer on someone who is actively working and cause them to loose their work. I wanted to give them a sufficient warning and a chance to cancel the shutdown. I wanted the Deployment, and the shutdown time, to be centrally managed. I wanted the computers to shut down instead of hibernate or suspend so a new GPO or other update would only be a day’s power on away.

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We use a lot of imaging using Altiris Deployment Solutions. Apparently computers do not report to the WSUS console as computer name, but some other special identifier. And imaging just copies this identifier. The symptom was that one computer would show up in the console, and then vanish and replaced by another. And then vanish and re replace by another. The script below runs as a start up GPO and fixes the imaging issue as well as a other issues with windows update and WSUS. The script looks for errors in the update logs and if finding them performs corrective measures. Remember, be sure to test it thoroughly in your environment before moving it into production.

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