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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Windows 7 Users Can’t Shut Down Their Computers

February 10, 2020

Still running Windows 7 since it is no longer being supported? According to a Bleeping Computer post, there is a "You don't have permission to shut down this computer." error message preventing restarts or shutdowns of Windows 7 computers. If you experience the problem, Bleeping Computer provided the procedure to fix the issue.

  1. Open the Run dialog by hitting the Windows+R combo, type gpedit.msc and hit OK.
  2. Go to Computer Settings > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options
  3. Search User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin approval and set it to ENABLE
  4. Open Run again and do a gpupdate /force
  5. Restart the system by opening the Run dialog again, type shutdown -r and hit OK

If you can't turn off after the gpupdate, then kill and rerun Explorer.exe from the Run dialog. Some folks are now blaming a recent Adobe update. Read the post if you are having a similar problem with shutting down Windows 7. Another reason to upgrade to Windows 10.

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