how to kill the pesky Windows 2003 shutdown tracker
ok so you've all seen it before; that annoying window that you HAVE to fill in before you can bounch a Win2K3 box ...
whilst it may be nice in a production environment to know when & “why” the server was rebooted, do we really care in any other case, like on a dev machine or staging server etc? i certainly never fill in anything useful when it prompts me anyways; it's usually the first key i can hit in frustration that gets logged ... so can you kill it you ask? well sure you can; use the group policy editor on the server [start | run | gpedit.msc], navigate to Admin templates and select the “ Display Shutdown Event Tracker “ setting.
then the next time you bounce your trusty windows machine instead of the annoying screen before you now see this ....
ah i feel better already! calm & peace return to my world ....