How To Remotely Reboot A Windows PC Via Command Prompt

Here’s how to remotely reboot a Windows PC via command prompt:

[Note: Steps 1, 2 and 3 are required for Windows PCs which are not in a domain. For remotely rebooting the Windows PC’s in a domain just follow step 4 using an administrative account for that domain]

1. Create a user account on the Windows PC you want to reboot remotely via command prompt. The user name and password for this account should be the same as the user name and password of your account on the local Windows PC from where you will issue the command.

2. Ensure that the user account created on the remote Windows PC is a member of ‘Administrators’ and ‘Remote Desktop Users’ groups only.

3. In the remote Windows PC’s properties, ensure that option ‘Allow users to connect remotely to this computer’ is checked and added to the list of remote desktop users.

4. Now, on the local Windows PC, issue the following command at the command prompt –

shutdown /r /f /t <xx> /m \\<remote PC name> -c “PC will reboot in xx seconds”

where, <xx> is time in seconds and can be any value between 0 to 315360000 (10 years)

and <remote PC name> is the UNC name of the remote Windows PC which needs to be rebooted.

In our case, we need to reboot a remote Windows XP PC on our LAN whose UNC name is ‘XP-Pro’. Hence, we will issue the following command at command prompt on the local PC –

shutdown /r /f /t 60 /m \\xp-pro -c “PC will reboot in 60 seconds”

5. Now the user on the remote PC will see a message notifying the user of the system reboot and the remote Windows PC will reboot after the number of seconds specified in the command in step 4.