Create a tile in the Start menu to shutdown/reboot the system directly in Windows 8

The new Windows 8 Start menu has been one of the main features of the new Microsoft operating system that has divided the user community the most, either due to ignorance in some cases when thinking that it was the only non-existent interface, or for other reasons. However, you may like the interface itself, although you may miss some other things.

One of them could be the ability to more easily access buttons to shut down, restart, log off, or suspend the device, without having to display the charms bar on the right, enter settings, press Start/Shutdown and choose one of the options.To solve this, in this article we will see how to create Tiles like the ones you see in the image above, to be able to perform these functions by clicking directly on them.

Create the shortcut that suits you best

First of all we must create a new shortcut to perform the function that interests us. To do this, we right click on any free part of the traditional desktop, enter New and we will see the option we are looking for.

When it asks us for the location of the element, we will put the one that matches what we want to do:

If we want a shortcut to turn off the equipment, we will put shutdown /p
If we want a shortcut to restart the computer, we will put shutdown /r /t 0
If we want a direct access to close session, we will put shutdown /l
If we want a direct access to suspend the equipment, we will put shutdown /h

Remember that we can create as many shortcuts as we want, and anchor them to the Start menu later.

Next, it will ask us for a name for the shortcut, and thanks to it we will identify it later, so it is advisable to use names like Shut down, Restart, Log off, etc.

Assign an icon and pin it to the start menu

We could pin these new shortcuts that will have appeared on the desktop directly to the Start menu, but they would appear without an image, simply with the default shortcut icon.

To assign them an icon, and to make them look better in the start menu, we will first need files with .ico extension to be able to use them in the newly created shortcuts. To do so, any page like ConvertIco will do.

We need as many images as shortcuts we have created, if we want to distinguish one from the other. For example, I used these:

To turn off

Restart

Sign off

Lay off

Once we have the image chosen, we will go to a website to convert it to ico format, like ConvertIco that I mentioned before. If you use this, when you enter, you can upload an image by URL or by searching on your PC. By giving GO, on the right will appear to download the loaded image, but in the format we want

Now we return to the shortcut that we created before, and we right click on it, to enter Properties. In the direct access tab, below, we will see the option Change icon, and when we enter we can click browse to find our previously created icon.

At this point, all we have to do is right click on each of the shortcuts, click on Pin to Start, and put them wherever you want in the Start menu.