I just got a new monitor from Dell, and after switching between a 21″ and a 19″ using the DVI connector, XP got all confused and couldn’t restore my video signal no matter which monitor I used. Even the analog monitor cable proved no use.
I was stuck with a number of running processes, and no way to shutdown the machine cleanly. Meanwhile, my computer chugged away, furious with disk activity from the applications that I had been running at the time. Killing the power was simply not an option.
The solution, was based on this clever article.
I press Windows-R, which I knew would bring up the run prompt. I typed cmd and pressed return, which I knew would put me at a shell. Then I typed shutdown -s -t 01, pressed enter, and waited.
The shutdown command appears to be a standard Microsoft steal of Unix’s shutdown command. The functionality is the same, but the parameters are slightly different as not to be compliant. (It’s like when they took Unix’s ifconfig and made it ipconfig, as if no one would notice.)
Anyhow, after a minute I heard the familiar sound of Windows shutting down, then the machine turned off. Upon a reboot, things worked fine – the hardware detection saw the new monitors, and Windows came up.