How to quickly put your laptop into Standby mode

I put my laptop in Standby mode a lot. In the morning before I leave for work. In the evening when I head home. Throughout the day if I am docking, undocking or traveling with my laptop.

I found a cool little utility to make Standby mode a double-click operation. It is simply an icon on my desktop that I can click when I want to put my laptop in standby mode.

This is not one of those time savers that will save you an hour a day. It is just a little laptop-hack to simplify your life a bit.

To set this up on your laptop, you must first download a freeware utility called PSshutdown. PSshutdown is included with a set of other “PS” tools available from the Microsoft website. PSshutodown was created by a company formally known as Sysinternals. In 2006, Microsoft acquired Sysinternals. See <this page> and click the link at the bottom of the page that says “Download PsTools (1 MB)” to download a ZIP file with all of the PS utilities.

Next, for the sake of simplicity, create a directory (folder) called “utils” on your C:\ drive. Then, copy the file PSshutdown.exe (from the ZIP file you downloaded earlier) to the c:\utils directory.

The last step is to create a Standby icon on your desktop.

1. Right Click on your Windows desktop
2. Select New >, then Shortcut
3. When prompted to “Type the location of the item”, enter: C:\Utils\psshutdown.exe -d -t 1
4. Lastly, type a name for the shortcut. I simply call my shortcut “Standby” (clever, eh?)

That’s it. You now have a quick and easy way to put your computer into Standby mode.

Other helpful tools
Freeware ZIP/UNZIP: Try 7 Zip, a simple, easy to use open source ZIPing utility. See http://www.7-zip.org/.