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As someone who works in IT desktop support and management, I have one question about Windows 8 which I haven't seen anyone comment on yet.

What's the minimalist keyboard logout/shutdown/reboot sequence like, by comparison to previous OS versions?


On XP, it was 4 or 5 keystrokes: Win, U, (L OR (Home, Down) OR R), Enter.

On Win7, it was 3 or 4 keystrokes: "Win, Right, Enter" to shut down, "Win, Right, Right, (L OR R)" to log out or reboot. (Assuming the default hadn't been changed.)

What is it on Windows 8?

Inside of a virtual machine running win8 consumer preview:

Winkey + D
Alt + F4
R
Enter

One could consider that 4 keystrokes I suppose.

I'd be more inclined to consider it 6, unfortunately.

My use-cases here are "how quick and easy is it to log out a public-area computer which someone left logged in?" and "how quick and easy is it to reboot or shut down a room full of 30 computers, one at a time?". XP took 4 or 5 keystrokes, but would buffer them, so you could hit the keys quickly even if the OS didn't respond fast enough; Win7 didn't do that same buffering, but was at least as good in most cases anyway because of needing fewer keystrokes to begin with.

I hope there are faster ways, perhaps less obvious ones, still to be discovered for Windows 8... because that looks like a considerable step back even from XP on this front, much less from Windows 7.

Fear my Google-fu:
http://superuser.com/questions/408015/h ... -the-mouse

How about a batch file using the shutdown command?

That wouldn't be keyboard-accessible, would it? At least not in a "reliable, access it the same way no matter where you start out from" sense. (Plus, what I wanted to know about is what works on any Win8 system, without requiring advance preparation.)

From the look of that Q&A thread, the winner is probably going to be Win+I, a letter or a few keystrokes, and Enter ; the fallback would be Win+C, something to select Settings, and then the same as before. Question is exactly what that "letter or a few keystrokes" would need to be.

WinKey-free shutdown sequence, a bit long though. Works whether you're in Start or in Desktop, no matter how many windows are open. Substitute <Win-I> for <Ctrl-Alt-Del> for the WinKey case.

Ctrl-Alt-Del
Shift-Tab
Shift-Tab
Enter
Home
Down
Enter