I have a couple of machines on my local network that I only access via Remote Desktop Connection. They are "headless" - meaning that they have no keyboard, mouse or monitor attached. When I access them remotely, there is no "Turn Off Computer" item on the Start Menu. How do I turn it off, or restart it?
And as you've seen, when you use Remote Desktop to get to your machine, the "Turn Off Computer" item is missing from the Start menu. To be honest, I'm not really sure why Microsoft chose to do that, it is inconvenient.
But we have ways.
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I previously recommended using a copy of psshutdown from the folks over at Sysinternals.com. This is a command line tool that will allow you to shut down or restart a computer remotely. It actually has several options to control how quickly, whether to force running applications to close, and so on. It's quite handy for batchfiles and to create shortcuts for shutting down.
Another approach doesn't involve downloading any additional software. As it turns out Task Manager already has what we need.
On the remote machine, right click on the clock, and select Task Manager. Task Manager has a Shutdown menu, which includes items to Turn Off and Restart. Those do the same thing as the missing Start Menu items.
Watch the video: Restarting Windows XP Remotely where I walk through the steps using Task Manager.
Related:
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Ask Leo! - Is there a way to suppress the dialog box when remotely rebooting a Windows XP machine?
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Ask Leo! - Where is Task Manager?
Article C2469 - November 23, 2005
Alt-F4 and Ctrl-Alt-End work great but my coworker who has XP SP2 also does have the Shutdown menu in Task Manager and I don't. Why?
Posted by: Rich at August 2, 2006 10:36 AMStangely, I just attempted a shutdown on my company's email server (not on our domain) and it worked. It shouldn't without the right admin permissions, but it did. So give it a try if you ever need it.
Posted by: Coupland at August 31, 2006 10:52 AMI find Shutdown.exe to be pretty useful. I perform a net use \\\ipc$ /u: and then can run shutdown.exe -f -r -m \\ and in about 30-60 seconds I can tell it's rebooting by using a ping -t in another command window. When the Request Time Out quit and it starts responding that's a nice clue that the OS is booting back up again.
Posted by: Shane at October 10, 2006 11:49 AMStart > Run > "shutdown"
"shutdown -r" if you want a restart.
Don't include the ""
Posted by: Joe at October 15, 2006 3:43 PMHi,
I really don't know where the Remote Desktop is gone, i don't see it anymore in any of my accounts. I've looked everywhere in Program Files logged in as an admin and nothing, i really don't know where is gone. How can i find it again????
Posted by: Chris at December 18, 2006 2:59 PMThe task manager will not have the "Shut Down" dialog if you are not using the welcome screen. This option is changed in the Control Panel under User Accounts and "Change the way users log on or off". You don't have to enable the memory hungry annoying welcome screen if you want to shut down remotely though, and a lot of company computer won't have this option because they are logging onto a domain. To shut down when you do not have the welcome screen enabled, simply press ctrl+alt+end in the Remote Desktop session. This will bring up the same dialog as the "Windows Security" option in the start menu, and from here you can shut down or restart your machine. To disable this option for remote users use the group policy editor.
Posted by: Michael Boratko at December 29, 2006 9:03 AMWe run in a domain enviroment. I found it easy to download psshutdown from sysinternals.com but you could also create a batch file on the desktop that executes shutdown -r. I add -t 10 to shorten the wait. The downside it that you must have admin privledges to execute either method.
Posted by: Guy at February 28, 2007 9:11 AMThere is an utility named process explorer in www.sysinternals.com. this allows you to replace the task manager with a more powerful utility and at the same time you will have what you need. When the app. is running minimized with te right button of your mouse you'll see the shutdown menu. It works I have it on all my machines.
Posted by: Arturo Alvarez at June 20, 2007 11:55 AMThere is also a way to call the shutdown / logoff / restart dilog box programmatically: copy and paste the following code into a .vbs or .vbe file and run it:
'beginning of code
Posted by: Peter Wanyonyi at May 26, 2008 10:06 PM'allows one to remotely bring up the shutdown dialogbox in Windows
Set WshShell = WScript.CREATEOBJECT("shell.application")
WshShell.ShutdownWindows()
HI
Posted by: Amardeep Rana at May 29, 2008 4:13 AMYou can use ALT F4 to shut down your head less machine if you are using them remotly. and can use the command shutdown -a machnename