Remotely shut down your computer

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.

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:

1. The shutdown command gets the ball rolling
2. -m \\computername should be the name of the computer you want to shutdown.
3. -s tells the remote computer to Shutdown.

There are a number of other arguments you can use.

1. -r tells the remote computer to Restart
2. -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!