Shut down Windows 8 from command line WITHOUT BANNER?

One can open the command line (cmd) and type

shutdown -s -t 1200 

to shut down Windows 8 in 1200 seconds. However, an ugly banner appears over the whole screen 10 minutes before the shutdown! Is there a way to avoid the banner showing up?

In PowerShell, use:

timeout -t 1800; shutdown -s

Or in cmd, use:

timeout 1800 && shutdown -s

They will cause a delay of 1,800 seconds (30 minutes), then perform the shutdown.

You're looking for a "wait" command to add before shutting down, instead of making shutdown do the waiting. According to this question, this should do the trick:

ping -n 1201 127.0.0.1 > nul && shutdown -s

There is a good utility in Sysinternals (now Microsoft) PSTools called psshutdown. I use it since Windows NT for remote shutdown. It can also do a local shutdown. To be honest, I didn't check the differences between psshutdown and shutdown. I think it's worth a try.

As per the delay, why not use the builtin scheduler? I am not familliar with powershell, but I believe that a script could be written that would get current date, time, add a desired interval ant then create a run once scheduled task to execute a shutdown.