Here are the different ways you can shut down your laptop

Sometimes, after a long day at work, you just want to shut down your laptop and hurry home as quickly as you can, and naturally want to shut your laptop down the minute you’re done with it. Maybe another time, your mouse may not be working. 

What do you do in such cases then? You use your keyboard of course. You can turn off your computer using a number of keyboard shortcuts.

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They are a quick and efficient way of shutting your system down in a hurry, should you need to do so. Here’s how.

Turning off a Windows laptop

1. Alt+F4

This is the most common way to shut down any app running on your computer. Alternatively, hitting these keys on your desktop screen also brings up a dialogue box, and gives you the option to either shut down, restart, or even put your laptop to sleep. 

2. Ctrl+Alt+Del

Pressing the Control, Alt, and Delete keys together opens up a window wherein you can choose whether to shut down, restart, or put your laptop to sleep.

3. Win+X

This is different from other shortcut keys because it doesn’t show a locked box. Instead, pressing these keys together brings up the power user menu, where you can also choose to log out of your user profile, in addition to shutting the system down.

Turning off a MacBook

Press the Command, Control, Option, and Power buttons together to turn off your MacBook. Once you do this, all of your MacBook’s open apps are forced to shut down immediately. Therefore, remember to use this shortcut only after saving your work.

You can also turn off your laptop without the shortcut keys. 

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On Windows devices, first click on the Windows icon on the bottom left of your device, on the taskbar, and use the down arrow keys to select the power option. Then select the option to shut down and press enter. For MacBook users, press the Control, Function and F2 keys together. This will open up options. Press enter and click on the arrow keys to navigate to the shutdown option. Then press enter again.

If all else fails, one can also long-press the power button on their Windows laptop or MacBook, until their screen goes dark. This step forces the laptop to shut down. However, using this method is not recommended, other than exceptional circumstances.

We hope this helps.