Forum Discussion
Windows does not shut down when pressing enter
Windows 11 does not shut down when I select the shut down option with my mouse and press the enter button to confirm; instead, it only goes into stand-by mode. I either have to use my mouse to confirm shutting down, or select the option for shutting down with my keyboard. I just noticed this bug today after I wondered many times why my PC has been going in stand-by mode instead of shutting down for days. I have always been selecting said option with my mouse while confirming it via the enter key and never experienced this inconvenience, so this must have been introduced with a recent Windows update.
Am I the only one having this issue? Is it a bug or intended (the latter wouldn't make any sense IMHO)?
3 Replies
Scroll down and click on Additional power settings under Related Settings.
This is most likely intended keyboard-focus behaviour, although it can feel like a regression. The Power menu does not have a separate confirmation step: moving the mouse over Shut down does not necessarily move keyboard focus to it. Pressing Enter activates whichever command still has keyboard focus, which may be Sleep.
So using the mouse to hover or visually select Shut down, then pressing Enter, is not a reliable input sequence in the current menu. There is no Windows setting that makes mouse hover over Shut down transfer keyboard focus to it. If this definitely worked differently before, restart File Explorer from Task Manager, install pending Windows updates, and test again. If directly clicking Shut down with the mouse also puts the PC to sleep, that would be a bug. Otherwise, this is a confusing design choice rather than a shutdown failure.
Yes, that's probably it.
It's a very bad design choice because being able to shut down my PC by pressing enter while hovering over the shut down option with my mouse is relatively important for me as I regularly use my PC till late at night/early morning, which is why I often have to walk away and turn my lights on so I can shut down my PC, in which case it is far more practical to just press enter instead of clicking the option.
Seems like I have to get used to this new behavior now, unless Microsoft (hopefully) decides to change this back in a future update.
