How-to: Remotely shut down your computer
Think of this scenario; You are lying in bed and just finished watching a movie that you were streaming from a computer downstairs. You want to sleep, but you need to head downstairs to turn the computer off. Save some time, and do it from the computer upstairs.
There are a number of ways that you can restart or shutdown remote computers. You could use a remote desktop connection, but there are quicker ways and we will look at them today.
This article will show you various methods you can use to shutdown or restart computers on your network. We will look at:
- Command Line/Shortcuts
- Windows Tools
- 3rd Party Applications
As well as looking after the environment and your pocket by saving electricity, it is surprisingly easy to achieve. This article is very much aimed at a home user. Most server operating systems have much more powerful tools available.
I have learnt a thing or two researching for this article.
What you need:
All of the methods below require you to have an administrator account on the computer you want to shut down. This was a relief for me as I could see all sorts of ways this could be abused without such security.
All the methods below will require you to have either the IP address or machine name of the computer or computers you want to shutdown remotely.
All of the methods below were created using Windows XP. Vista offers the same commands and a few extras, while Windows 2000 has similar commands. If you use 2000, change the “-“ to a “/”.
Method 1: Command line
Microsoft has included a tool that comes with Windows that will be the focus of most of this article. I always like to use inbuilt utilities when they are available. In this case the command is “shutdown”.
If you open up a command prompt (Start > Run > Cmd) and type “shutdown”, you will see that there are a bundle of arguments you can use with the shutdown command. The -m argument followed by the machine name, and a -r(restart trigger) will shutdown your computer. The best way for me to explain it is through examples.
In the command prompt, try the following:
shutdown -m \\computername -s
Lets break it down:
- The shutdown command gets the ball rolling
- -m \\computername should be the name of the computer you want to shutdown.
- -s tells the remote computer to Shutdown.
There are a number of other arguments you can use.
- -r tells the remote computer to Restart
- -l tells the remote computer to logoff
So that is all you need to know to do it from the command line. I find it a bit tricky to remember all the switches, so the methods below are more ideal for me.
Method 2: Shortcuts
This method uses the same “shutdown” command as above. The only difference is that we put the command into a shortcut so that we can launch it quickly.
Right click on your desktop
Select “New”
Select “Shortcut”
In the path put in:
shutdown -m \\computername -s
Call it whatever you want and change the icon if you would like.
Now you have a shortcut that when it is launched will shutdown the remote computer. How easy is that!
Method 3: Windows Tools
The “shutdown” command we have been looking at above has a graphical front end with a few nice features in it. If you have multiple computers you want to shut down, this may be a good option for you.
To get into it, open a command prompt and type “shutdown -i”
The graphical front-end will open up.
In here, you will see the same options available to you as the manual methods above, but this time you can list or browse multiple computers on your network and do bulk shutdowns or restarts.
It is fairly self explanatory, so I won’t go into it much more. It isn’t all that powerful. Check out another utility below.
This method requires you to put in a reason as to why you are restarting/shutting down. It’s a real pain.
Method 4: External utilities
RCL– Remote Computer Log On is a program I came across while scouring through SourceForge. It doesn’t look like much, but it is much more powerful and user friendly than the options above.
RCL was originally designed by a school teacher to control the computers in a computer lab. RCL offers no annoying fonts or popups. It makes up for them in features.
You can login/out, shutdown or restart multiple computers. There is even a feature to enable or disable Internet access.
The computer list uses text files making it easy to list groups of computers; i.e. one file for each lab.
It may be more than you want, but I am definitely going to be using this gem. If only I had it 3 years ago. Download it from SourceForge.
Another program of note is XP remote Timer. It runs much the same as the shutdown command but it offers a timer feature. It might be a good way to control how much time the kids use their computer.
Which method is right for me?
When this article was suggested to me, shortcuts seemed like the most practical way to control 1 or 2 remote computers. As the amount of computers increased, the graphical utilities won out.
Note:
Windows has inbuilt power management features which you might choose to use to shutdown a machine automatically when it is not in use for a certain period of time. This would achieve the same thing, but it removes the control you can have.
Conclusion:
I hope this article has been useful to you and saved you some time and manual labour (walking). Please stick around and check out some other articles at Inspect My Gadget – for lazy people.
This is excellent, but I never shutdown my PCs, I put them on Standby, isn’t there a command for this?
I use wizmo http://www.grc.com/wizmo/wizmo.htm to shutdown my computer at a certain time with the task planner. if I want to listen to music while I doze off, there is another neat solution, that doesn’t just kill my iTunes by shutting down the machine. it makes a rather nasty sound on my soundcard if I do that. I looked for a way to stop iTunes before shutting down and I found this: http://www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/processutil/processutil.htm
a utility that kills processes. so next I wrote a small batch script that is called at a fixed time (task planner), that shuts down iTunes (process killer) and then shuts down my machine (wizmo).
I’m lying in bed with my laptop right now and I’ve just tried method 1. didn’t work. command line displayed the answer “access denied”. Perhaps this is due to enabled firewall…
I use my PC simply for streaming and backup, the biggest issue I had to deal with is that the laptop I use is a Mac. To get around this, I use WakeOnLAN (http://homepage.mac.com/dtl/readpixel/wakeonlan/), to turn the PC on, and AMP WinOFF (http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/WinOFF.php) to power down. I’ve configured WinOFF to run at boot on an auto-login Guest account and then shutdown the PC after 2 minutes of less than 2% CPU usage. Very handy, especially because I will usually forget to turn it off otherwise.
Dereks, I came across this. You need to make sure you have an admin account on each computer and that you run the shutdown command as an administrator.
I have the same problem
“You need to make sure you have an admin account on each computer and that you run the shutdown command as an administrator.”
But how do you do that?
I have an administrator account on my current computer.
I have a seperate administrator account on the computer I want to shut down.
How to I login to a remote computer?
Obviously I know how to login with tools like logmein.com, but how do you do it with just Windows?
I use a symbian phone with wifi; my pc, laptops are on same network and I wanted to know is there a way to shutdown/hibernate my _windows_ pc remotely.
I was able to shutdown/restart a *nix pc remotely using PuTTy & was able to ssh to my cell phone. But could not think of any eazy/free method for windows??
Cool solution. One question remains though. How do I remotely login as admin on the pc to be shutdown before using the command?
It is all based on where the ’shutdown’ command is ran from. If it is from an administrator account you should be fine.
Maybe it uses password pass-thru? Set both PC’s admin accounts to the same username and password..
I use a cool small utility program Dshutdown (http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/) for the purpose of shutting down local/remote my computer.
It can trigger shutdown at various events including internet speed dropped to a level, on completion of an application and man more.
Worth taking a look.
That program looks quite powerful Rahul. It could well do many of the extra bits commenters are asking for. It looks a bit harder to use than the programs in the article, but it can automate the shutdown of remote PC’s. Very useful.
You don’t need to be logged in as admin on the remote computer, but you do need an admin account on that computer. The account should be the same as you are using on the local computer.
A critical missing detail is that it will not work if you do not create a matching username/password for the aministrator accounts of each machine involved. Trying to use “no password required” accounts will not work, even if the username is the same on both machines, no password required on both machines and is an administrator on both machines. You must declare a password.
Good point Mike. Thanks
Finally figured out the underlying problem. After still not being able to get this to work, despite having the same username/password with admin privileges on both machines, I explored using the PsShutdown of sysinternals ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897541.aspx ). That failed too.
But, I then found a forum post explaining the true underlying cause! Windows XP pro machines, that are not part of a domain, may have to have a security setting reset back to classic mode in order to allow remote connections to connect as the remote user rather than as Guest. To fix this, do the following:
Administrative Tools-> Local Security Settings-> Local Policies-> Security Options, and
look for the line “Network Access:Sharing and security model for local accounts”.
New XP installations, and those with recent security updates, will have a default value of “Guest only - local users authenticate as Guest”.
Change it back to “Classic - local users authenticate as themselves”.
Explanation taken from this forum post:
http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=3308&PN=2&TPN=2
Haven’t actually tried it with shutdown yet, but I strongly suspect that it’s the same thing.
I cannot believe this works. Mike (not me) you are a genius. No where does this critical piece of information exist but here.
realy it’s very useful utility to work remotely.
i canot get it to work it i want to shut down my sisters pc and mess around with her but it says the network path was not found any help thanxs
hayden, you could try using IP address instead of the computer name. Shutting down someones computer when they have documents open, can make them lose information. If you are doing it as a practical joke, take a lot of caution. There are a number of practical jokes on this site that may be more fun and less harmful/risky. Go to the practical jokes category on the right.
How can i open a computer romotly
Thank you all for the contributions .Am still hookup with this.i tried method 1 and 2 but nothing works for me . I keepon receiving thesame error.”Network path was not found” using both username and ip address of the machines
Very awesome. i shutdown computers at my school and its amusing XD
hi! thank you for give me knowledge.
Here is how to use Microsoft Outlook to shutdown your computer.
http://bossmanthe.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-shutdown-your-computer-windows.html
Enjoy!
i tried method 3 with both computer names and ip adresses but it keeps coming up with network adress not found.
any help?
Josh, try it with your firewall turned off.. Go into control panel and security center.
Use method 1 to see if things work to try to narrow down the problem. Also, try doing it from both computers. This may tell you if there is something blocking the one computer.
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