Chameleon Shutdown is an interesting tool that gives you greater control over how and when your PC shuts down, restarts, hibernates and so on.

Initially the program looks a little, well, basic. It presents a simple interface with six buttons, and if you, say, click Shutdown > Right Now then the program will close down the PC for you. But that's just the start. Choose Shut Down > With Parameters, and things get much more interesting.

Would you like your PC to close in two hours, for instance? Just set the timer and click Start. Or maybe you'd prefer it to close down at a specific time? That's possible, too.

Of course if you're leaving your PC to complete some task then you may not know precisely when it's going to finish. But that's fine: Chameleon Shutdown can also wait until a particular program closes before it jumps into action. Or you might trigger the shutdown when your CPU usage drops below some defined period, or your PC has been idle for a certain amount of time.

If this isn't quite enough then you can even combine several conditions. And of course these don't just apply to shutting down a PC: you can also use the tool to restart or hibernate your system, send it to sleep, lock your PC or just log off.

When you're done, click the Start button and Chameleon Shutdown will minimise to the system tray, monitoring your system for the conditions you've specified. It's all very straightforward, and the program's also light on system resources, consuming less than 2MB RAM when running in the background on our test PC.