Remote reboot from MMC

** NOTE – The content in the original post from 2009 doesn’t work with Win 7 and up, so it’s kind of useless these days :)

There are way easier ways than MMC to do this kind of thing.  Namely, the shutdown command.

• Start a command window as administrator (start, type CMD, right click on the CMD icon under programs, click “Run as Administrator”)
• type shutdown /m \\computername /r /f
  • Note that /r will reboot and /f forces programs to close immediately
  • More detail can be found on the technet page for shutdown
• OR you can type shutdown /i to bring up the shutdown window.  From there you can add computers, specify restart options, display messages etc.

This is the original 2009 post:

Have you ever needed to reboot a machine remotely? This is easy to do via MMC, the Microsoft Management Console.

In XP, do the following.

1) Right click the My Computer icon and choose manage to bring up the MMC.

2) From there, go to the Action menu and choose Connect to another computer (you can also right click on Computer management and choose the same thing).

3) Enter the name of the computer that you are looking to reboot.

4) In the next window, right click on Computer Management and go to properties.

5) In the next window, choose the advanced tab

6) Click the Startup and recovery settings button

7) Click on Shutdown. Don’t worry, after you click the button you will get options to shutdown, shutdown/restart etc. Choose the option you want and click ok.

8 ) Select Force Apps Closed and click ok.

9) Step back and enjoy.

There are other ways to accomplish the same thing – kill.exe from the NT resource kit, remotely install a remote control tool like VNC, or a shutdown tool from sysinternals.  Note that kill.exe is now part of the Microsoft Debugging Tools, not the 2003 resource kit.