A couple of years back when Windows Vista came out I blogged about the several Windows Vista Shutdown options that were available back then after reading an article on Joel Spolsky’s blog.
It’s really great to see that a suggestion I had back then on a possible solution to this problem has actually been incorporated in Windows 7! I may not have been the only person who though of this but hey I did think about it and now it exists as a feature!
Here’s a snippet from what I wrote back in January 2007
“So Microsoft here is my suggestion, I would like to be able to do something like this, right click the sleep button, click a menu item that says set default action or something like that, and then choose the one that suits me. I think this way the problem that Spolsky mentioned of too many choices would be minimized and I would be able to shutdown my computer by clicking the button...” link to the full post is above.
Now if you are using Windows 7 you can change the default action of the shutdown button – a.ka. the power button to be whatever you want from the possible options by doing the following.
From the start menu right click on the word Shutdown as shown below then select properties
when the properties dialog pops up go to the second tab as shown below
In this example I’ve chosen restart to be my default option. Now after updating if I bring up the start menu again I see Restart as the power button name/action. Cool!
This is one of my best liked features so far in Windows 7 aside from the document grouping by application.