This trick works fine on physical and virtual machines with APM support (firstly, you should ensure APM is not disabled in the BIOS). Most motherboards released after 1995 support APM whereas some earlier ones support it too (APM was actually created in 1992).
Now, here the guide:
1) download that freeware:
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on the computer running Windows 3.x
3) for convenience, I suggest to move SHUTDOWN.COM on the root C:\
4) open AUTOEXEC.BAT (located at C:\) with a basic text editor
5) add the word « win » to the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT
6) then, add « SHUTDOWN –S » as the last line of the file
7) save AUTOEXEC.BAT and exit the text editor
If you correctly followed the above instructions, AUTOEXEC.BAT must end by these two lines :
Code : Tout sélectionner win SHUTDOWN -S |

Last advice: MS-DOS 6.0 or later is recommanded. Indeed, if you sometimes use DOS programs in real mode, you could easily doing that by pressing F5 or F8 at the startup. This feature didn't exist in DOS 5.0.