Shutdown options in Vista and restarting

With all of the blog posts about the shutdown options in Vista (Choices = Headaches by Joel Spolsky, The Windows Shutdown crapfest & The Design of the Mac OS X Shutdown Feature) I thought I would add a couple thoughts of my own. First of all I thought all of those options were confusing but more so I hated how hard it was for me to do it with the keyboard. On XP I would hit Win, u and then r (restart) or u (shutdown?). It was pretty quick and easy. Now on Vista I can't type anything because the search box is up (what a great feature btw). So instead I was stuck hitting over arrow and then getting to that little menu like this:

Then I thought back to my NT days when I would hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete (hey since when did the Control key become Ctrl? All my keyboards say Ctrl, not Control, weird!) When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del I see something like this:

To get to that little widget in the bottom right I needed to hit a bunch of keys on the keyboard, down, down, etc. That was a pain too, how come it isn't as easy as it used to be. Well I was talking to a friend of mine on the Windows Shell and he told me to bring up that menu just hit Alt-S. That will bring up that menu so then you can hit 'r' to restart. So now I have it, Ctrl-Alt-Del, alt-s, r. Then I have restarted!

Seems like a lot to get your machine to restart eh? Well I just learned another way too: Start and then type "shutdown /r" that will restart your machine right away too (in ~30 sec).

I just wanted to share the Alt-S keyboard shortcut and tell you about the shutdown command (which wasn't on XP by default though I am pretty sure it was in Windows 2003 Server). Thanks Brian for the shell tip!