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Creating a shortcut should be familiar to almost everyone, but we will walk through the process just for clarity. There are other ways to accomplish this task, but this is my preferred method. First, right-click on a clear spot on the desktop and navigate to New | Shortcut, as shown in Figure A.

When you click the Shortcut menu item, you will arrive at the input screen shown inFigure B. This is where you will enter the specific command strings to make your new shortcut do what you want it to do.

For our example, we will enter the specific command that will shut down a Windows PC. Type the following command into the box and then click Next.

Shutdown.exe -s -t 00

The next screen (Figure C) asks you to name the shortcut. I suggest you name the shortcut to correspond to the action it will perform. In this case, we name it Shutdown.

Technically, you could stop here, but I prefer to give these shortcuts an icon that will help me remember what it is they do. In Windows 7, changing an icon is similar to how you changed icons in previous versions of the operating system.

Right-click on the icon in question to get the context menu shown in Figure D and then navigate to the Properties menu item.

From the Properties control panel, shown in Figure E, select the Change Icon button.

The next screen (Figure F) will show you a list of potential icons. Choose the one you want to use and click the OK button twice.

You should now have a new shortcut on your desktop. When you click the shortcut, your PC will shut down, so make sure you save your work before you test it.