Basic GUI menu for shutting down a Windows computer using various methods.
Written in C# on .NET Framework 4.0.
Power icon by Cole Bemis, using MIT (Open Source) license.
Several methods, including undocumented functions converted from C++, can be used to trigger a shutdown of Windows OS or the computer hardware.
Safe shutdown methods:
- ExitWindowsEx(): Self-explanatory, will shutdown, logoff, or restart the system with a given shutdown reason (set to Minor/Other by default). Documentation/original code can be found here, or see this article for a more detailed explanation.
- InitiateSystemShutdownEx(): Can be used to trigger a system shutdown similar to using "shutdown.exe -t" with command line. Documentation/original code can be found here.
Hard shutdown methods:
- NtShutdownSystem(): Kernel (ntdll) function called at the very end of a normal Windows shutdown process. The function tells drivers to shut down, flushes disc cache and registry hive copies, clears the paging file, then calls NtSetSystemPowerState (see below). Documentation/original code can be found here.
- NtSetSystemPowerState(): Kernel (ntdll) function which shuts down all plug-and-play devices and sets the CPU power status to halt, reboot or power off. Documentation/original code can be found here.
- SetSystemPowerState(): Similar to NtSetSystemPowerState but meant only for smart devices, since it uses .NET Compact Framework (I have not tested this on non-desktop devices as of release). Uses coredll as base library. Documentation/original code can be found here.
Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) methods:
- NtRaiseHardError(): Returns an NT status code (list). If it is an error code (i.e. 0xC0000000 or above), it causes a BSOD, otherwise it will usually only return a message box. No administrator privileges are needed. For the purposes of this application, non-error codes have been removed from the list of available ones to use in the menu. Documentation/original code can be found here.
- NtSetInformationProcess(): Toggles the "critical" status of a particular process (here, it will use this application as the base process). Windows will automatically crash if it detects that any process set to critical has been shut down unexplicably; one example of this is "csrss.exe". For this purpose, I have simply reused most of the code from this tutorial with minor edits.
Some of the methods used to hard shutdown the computer are UNSAFE and will lead to the loss of all unsaved data if used. It is recommended to try this app on a virtual machine instead!