How to shutdown uTorrent or your PC automatically when downloads complete

Depending on how you use uTorrent, especially how much you download with it, you may have encountered situations where you had to leave the PC while downloads were not completed yet. Maybe you had to go to work or school, or to bed late at night.

You then had to choose between keeping the PC running to continue to download from the Internet, or shut it down and continue in the morning if that is possible.

Keeping the PC turned on may be a good choice, but it may have the result that the PC will still be turned on after all downloads have finished. That's not only wasting energy but may also be problematic as someone else could access the PC in the meantime, especially if you are not out of home.

Shutting the PC down while downloads are still running on the other hand means that you will have to continue the next time you start the PC up. While that may not be a big issue, as time is not critical usually when it comes to downloads, it sometimes may be, for instance if downloads are limited.

The uTorrent client has its own auto-shutdown feature that can be overlooked easily. When I first started to look for it, I went through all the preferences in hope of finding it. It was later that I discovered the auto shutdown option under Options in the menu.

The developers of the program have added quite a few shutdown options to uTorrent:

• You can quit the program itself.
• You can change the power state to hibernate, standby, reboot.
• You can shutdown the entire PC.

The program distinguishes between downloads and everything as you can see from the screenshot above. Downloads refers to all torrent files that you are downloading, while everything includes torrents that you are seeding.

Simply select one of the available options. It is then highlighted by the program here, so that you know what will happen when downloads or uploads & downloads complete in the client.

You can use it for a couple of things. First, you can configure uTorrent to quit when all downloads complete. This prevents further sharing. Another option that you have is to configure the program to shut down your entire PC after downloads completes. This is ideal if you need downloads to finish while you need to go to bed, work or school.

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