You don’t have permission to shut down and restart this computer

If you receive an error message that prevents you from shutting down or restarting a Windows PC or laptop, you must apply a policy setting or modify the registry to resolve this issue. The error occurs regardless of how you restart your computer, that is, the power button, the Start menu, or even the command prompt. The operating system cancels the stop command with an error message – You are not authorized to shutdown and restart this computer. This can happen on Windows 10/8/7.

You are not authorized to shutdown and restart this computer

To apply the fix, we will need to modify or apply a “Run all administrators with administrator approval” group policy so that it can run for all users. Another method is to make changes to the registry.

1. Group policy method
2. Recording method
3. What is the use of the User Account Control: Enable Administrator Approval Mode?

Since Windows Home users do not have access to Group Policy, follow the registry method. Also be sure to create a restore point.

1]Group policy method

• Open the Run dialog box by pressing the Windows + R combo box, type gpedit.msc and press OK.
• Go to Computer Settings> Windows Settings> Security Settings> Local Policies> Security Options
• Search User account control: run all administrators with administrator approval and set it to ACTIVATE
• Open the Run prompt and run the command gpupdate / force. It will force update all group policies to reflect the recent change you made
• Reboot the system by reopening the Run dialog box, type shutdown -r and press OK

If you cannot deactivate after gpupdate, then kill and re-run Explorer.exe from the Run dialog box

2]Registry method to activate LUA

Open the Registry Editor

Navigate to the next location where the registry key for this is available.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesSystem

Locate EnableLUA and double-click to change the value

Set the value to 1 to set to On. If you use 0, then it is treated as disabled.

What is the use of the User Account Control: Enable Administrator Approval Mode?

This policy setting controls the behavior of all user account control (UAC) policy settings for the computer. When you enable it, to allow the built-in administrator account and all other users who are members of the Administrators group to run in administrator approval mode. Simply put, this should allow administrator users to do everything that an administrator account is allowed to do on the computer.

When disabled or misconfigured, Windows Security Center informs you of the overall reduction in functionality. In our case, it was the restriction to shutdown or restart the computer.

For what I saw in the forums, it is not only the restart problem that can be solved with this solution but a bunch of problems. It includes saving files from third-party applications, restarting the computer, shutting down, etc.

I hope the message was easy to follow.

Related Reading: Prevent users from shutting down or restarting Windows 10 computers.