Shutting down your PC is normally a fairly straightforward process (unless you’re running Windows 8, but that’s another story). Your work is done, documents saved, applications closed, so you just hit the Shutdown button and Windows takes care of the rest.

If some important task hasn’t completed, though – a file is still being downloaded, or a video file rendered – then life is a little more complicated. You can still have your PC shut down automatically when the job has finished, but you’ll need a little third-party help to make this happen. And that’s where Chameleon Shutdown comes in.

Launch the program, click Shutdown > With Parameters, and you can start to define when you’d like your system to close. Which, at its simplest, might just be after a specific delay (in 10 minutes, 2 hours or whatever you like), or at a particular time.

A straightforward interface means you'll be using the program right away

Of course if you’re waiting for some lengthy task to complete then you may not know precisely when it’s going to end. And so Chameleon Shutdown can also leap into action on the closure of a particular program, or when CPU usage drops below a defined figure.

If you need more power then you can even combine these conditions, so for example not closing your system until it’s 4:00pm or later, and CPU usage is below 5%, and a specific program has closed down, and your PC has been idle for 15 minutes (the latter being a useful safeguard, just in case anyone else has come along and started using the system).

And despite its name, Chameleon Shutdown doesn’t just close your PC. You can also trigger restart, sleep, hibernate, lock or log off actions, just by choosing the one you need from a list.

The program has a few small shortcomings. It’s not always obvious how to set up the conditions, for instance. And you can’t save complex sets of conditions for easy reuse later. Chameleon Shutdown remembers what you did last time, but if you want to recreate anything else then you’ll have to start from the beginning.

There’s still plenty of flexibility here for a free tool, though, and in particular it’s very light on system resources (the program used under 2MB RAM when running in the background on our test PC). So if you’d sometimes like to delay or automate your shutdowns or restarts, give Chameleon Shutdown a try: it could provide everything you need.