Add shutdown, reboot to Windows 8 WinX menu

Maybe you like me and found it a bit too much clicking to do a simple shutdown or reboot  in Windows 8 CP. Fortunately there is this nice menu (called WinX menu by other bloggers) in the left bottom corner that pops up when you do a right click. It has tons of useful commands for power users and would be a nice fit for a shutdown/reboot command as well.

The menu is driven by a specific folder structure and shortcuts that live under your user profile in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\WinX. Each folder in the WinX folder groups the commands in the menu and generates a menu separator in the UI of the menu.

Now that we know that, it’s easy to add our own commands there. We create a new folder called Group4 and place two shortcuts into the new folder. For shutdown and reboot we use the shutdown.exe located in System32.

Actually we good to go but the newly created links will not show up even after a re-login. The reason for that is an approval mechanism Microsoft build in to avoid arbitrary links in the WinX menu. You can read more about that topic here http://www.withinwindows.com/2012/04/04/windows-8-secrets-the-winx-menu-and-its-hashing-algorithm/. The author also provides a nice tool to make our links approved links which can be downloaded here http://www.withinwindows.com/files/uploads/2012/04/hashlnk_vs2010.zip. In order to perform our final step we have to extract the downloaded hashlnk.exe and open a command prompt. The program takes the link to approve as a parameter, hashlnk.exe %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\WinX\Group4\Reboot.lnk

Here we go, after the next login we can perform shutdown and restart right from the WinX menu.

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