There are several, or rather, many, errors that at any given moment can give us a scare in Windows. Fortunately, the operating system itself has various functions that help us to solve them. Here we are going to focus on the solutions of the error You do not have permission to turn off the PC in Windows that we can find at any time.
Undoubtedly, at certain times the Redmond system shows us certain error messages that can confuse us a bit. These can arise suddenly because of us or due to a failure of the system or its applications. This is precisely the case that we will talk about in these same lines, a failure that does not allow us to shut down the PC properly.
What causes the error that does not allow us to shut down Windows
As with the Windows startup process, the shutdown process is also very important. It is also something that we carry out on a daily basis, since a correct shutdown of Windows avoids potential problems with the system in the future. Therefore it is always advisable to turn off the Windows computer, for example from the corresponding button on the Start menu, not directly with the physical shutdown button.
But on certain occasions, fortunately rarely, we can come across a message that will prevent us from doing so. Therefore, if we receive an error message that does not allow us to shut down or restart the Windows PC or laptop, let’s see how to solve it. Later we will see that we must make changes to a group policy , or modify the registry to solve this problem.
First of all, what we must know is that the error occurs regardless of how the computer is started. That is, this can occur regardless of whether we did it through the power button, the Start menu, or even the command prompt. And it is that we find the operating system itself cancels the shutdown command with an error message. It reads something like you do not have permission to shut down or restart this computer. You also have to know that this can happen from Windows 7 onwards.
Fix the error that prevents the PC from shutting down
Well, to apply the possible solutions that we will have to use, on the one hand we can try to change a group policy. But this is not the only thing we can try, since another method is to make some changes in the operating system’s own registry, or to modify the User Account Control. Let’s see below in more detail what we can do if Windows suddenly does not allow us to shut down or restart the PC in a traditional way.
Open group policies to shut down the PC
Let’s start with a method that not all editions of Windows 10 have access to. And you have to know that, for example, users who have Windows Home do not have access to group policies. So they can take a look at the following Windows Registry method.
In order to open the local group policy editor in Windows 10 Pro, the first thing we do is click on the Win + R combination. This will lead us to the Run dialog box of the operating system. Well, here we just have to write the gpedit.msc command and click OK to open it.
Once we have this editor on screen, we go to the following route:
Configuración del equipo / Configuración de Windows / Configuración de seguridad / Directivas locales / Opciones de seguridad
Once here we will have to locate the entry called User Account Control: Run all administrators in Administrator approval mode. We click twice on it and set it as Enabled.
Next we open a command prompt window through the CMD command . We can write this in the search box. Next, in the window that appears we execute the following command:
gpupdate /force
Say this will force update all group policies to reflect the change you just made. After that we restart the system by pressing Win + R, and in the box that we see we type the following:
shutdown –r
Modify the registry to shut down on PC in Windows
On the other hand, we are going to try to change the user account control policy , all from the Windows Registry Editor itself. The first thing here is to type Regedit in the system search box to access the registry. In the window that appears, we go to the following location:
Equipo/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/System
Once here we will have to locate the entry called EnableLUA in the right panel. We double click to edit the value and set it to value 1 to activate this. If in the future we want to deactivate it again, we just have to change it to 0.
It should be clear that this change we make in the account control controls the behavior of all the policy settings as such ( UAC ). Therefore, enabling it allows the administrator account, and all other users who are members of the administrators group, to run in administrator approval mode. In other words, we allow users to do everything that an Administrator account can do on the PC.
At the same time it is worth mentioning that when this policy is disabled or configured incorrectly, the Windows Security Center will notify you. This translates into a general reduction in functionality, such as the restriction of shutting down the computer or restarting it, which is the problem that we faced in this specific case. It is also interesting to know that the failure that we have talked about in these same lines can lead to other problems. And it is not only that we will not be able to shut down or restart Windows in a traditional way. We could also have problems when saving certain files from third-party applications, so solving it will never hurt.