Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
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?
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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.
Article C2469 - November 23, 2005
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
The 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