I get it. Sometimes I leave Windows open with suspicious content when I go to school.

Perfect instead of telling my sister to turn it off!

Andy

I don't really get the point of this, but it is cool.

Toptiger5

My dad was asking about this today. He's got employees that stick around after work just surfing the internet. I could schedule mail to be sent to all computers on the network using a cron job and all computers would shutdown.

The other part is using the BIOS to turn the computers on in advance everyday. This would save on electricity by not having computers run overnight... just during business hours.

A3sthetix

@A3sthetix: Seems like you'd be better off scheduling each computer to shut off - especially if you're willing to schedule each one to turn on in the BIOS. What if they don't use Thunderbird or set it not to check mail automatically?

If you want to broadcast a shutdown message within a network from a Windows PC, you might be better off with one of the tools in this CybernetNews article:

[cybernetnews.com]

joelena

If you are leaving your computer you can just tell it to shut down after a certain amount of time with Start->Run (Super key + R) and typing "shutdown -f -s -t 3600" without the quotes and where F stands for force shutdown, s stands for shutdown (hibernate (h), logout (l) and restart (r) available as well but I haven't tried suspend or anything else). t stands for time in seconds so 60 seconds * 60 minutes = 3600 seconds or 1 hour. You can also save this in a batch file in the startup folder to automatically shut down say after 12 hours or so.

daybringer

@A3sthetix and @daybringer:
I agree about scheduling the shutdown. Along with the tools mentioned in the article linked by joelena, check the Sysinternals Process Utilities at [technet.microsoft.com] You can shutdown, suspend or kill tasks etc., on remote computers (with Admin access of course).

zkam

A couple notes. I noticed the article was written for thunderbird portable, but I can account that it works on the regular version as well (I tried it this weekend). On Vista, it gives a popup saying the computer will shutdown in 1 minute.

Also, I can see how there could be other ways to shutdown a computer remotely, as many people have said already. The application for this is unique though.

I actually used it today to shutdown my computer from my ipod touch. I was out running a quick errand and ended up running into friends and going to see a movie. So, I whipped out the itouch and shutdown my laptop from the theater.

Keeter

What I'd like to see is a way to remotely turn on a pc, that way I could turn it on 15 or so minutes before I get home and have a nice fresh boot ready when I get there.

Dont really know of a way to rig anything up without keeping the pc on (shutdown.exe -r -f), I have thought about rewiring a text pager + mobo power switch so that a sms message triggers a simulated button press instead of a beep/vibrate.

If anyone's done/seen anything like this let me know.
DN

PS: Looks like LH disabled the u (underline) html tag, I wonder why..?

Darth_Ninja

You want the reverse of this article then: [lifehacker.com]

JorgeBurgos

not the reverse, almost that exactly but from a mobile phone.

Darth_Ninja

You'd need another computer running, port 8 (UDP) forwarded (if the other computer wasn't on the same network), and this tool [www.matcode.com] along with the thunderbird setup to do that.

It seems the fact that you would need another computer running to receive the text message sort of destroys the point.

aresgunther

I've set all this up but I have one problem, when I get a message the alert is triggered but in the command window all I see is "shutdown -s" scrolling without it actually doing anything. What am I doing wrong?

randitobandito

this is cool if your work computer is behind an NAT and you want to access: you can install an auto-connecting vnc server, and just set it to run when it gets the email and it will automatically connect to your home vnc viewer thats in listening mode.

ajaholic

Use winkick.exe with its command line switches to force reboots and shutdowns.

igald

Right although it doesnt rule out some sort of hardware hack like a pager wired into the power button on the mother board, just send a blank text to the pager to short the cable and power on the pc.

Darth_Ninja