Remote administration of computer is very important when it comes to corporate or any business environment that has been wired and networked with more number of external networks and systems. Often network administrators use commercially licensed tools. But for a small network we cannot afford to use such tools and we mostly use open-source or freeware. We should always be aware that few of such tasks (Remote PC Shutdown, Create and manage users and privileges etc) can be done manually from command line. Today I am going to explain about remote PC shutdown within the network from command line.

shutdown.exe is an external command in Windows XP and helps the user to do a remote shutdown. To shutdown a remote computer use the command

shutdown /s /m <COMPUTER NAME> - To shutdown a remote PC

shutdown /r /m <COMPUTER NAME> - To restart a remote PC

shutdown/? - To get help about the syntax

The above commands can be used to shutdown or restart the remote PC from command line. To do the same job with more flexibility with a shutdown dialog box use the following command

shutdown -i

Hope this small explanation helps you. You need to enable remote guest shutdown privileges if the computer you want to shutdown is Windows Home. Remote shut down is not possible if your user id doesn’t have sufficient privileges or group policies are enabled. Generally guest remote shutdown is disabled for security reasons. For more information about the command read Microsoft support page.