Remote Shutdown

Network administrators may be charged with the task of shutting down all workstations at the end of the day. In this particular case, Remote Shutdown can make an administrator's job much easier. As its name suggests, the application is capable of shutting down remote computers over a network. It can detect workstations, controllers and various servers on a local network automatically and it allows you to shut them down with a single click.

Remote Shutdown is free to try for evaluation purposes and it won't hinder you with any restricted functions or nag screens during the trial period. The application can be used on any modern Windows platforms and it can be installed quickly, without any effort. Its hardware requirements are modest and it doesn't ask for any supplementary tools or services.

The user interface has a clean design, which makes it quite easy to manage several computers on a local network. Added computers are listed on the left side of the window, where you can organize them in different groups. The application allows you to shut down or restart more than one computer in a single run. All you have to do is select one or more computers or a group, by clicking their corresponding check boxes, after which you have to choose a shutdown or restart action in a drop menu and hit an Execute option, on the right side of the interface. When you shut down a computer, its icon will be replaced with a grayed out one, which makes it easy to figure out if a machine is working or turned off.

Adding new computers on the application's interface is quite easy. You only need to specify a remote machine's name or IP address or select it with a standard browsing option on a small window. If the computer requires login credentials, you can insert them on the same window, on a different tab. The application can use a specific set of credentials for a certain computer at all times, but it can be set to prompt for the username and password, to use inherited credentials or the current user's credentials.

Besides adding computers one by one, you can also run a wizard to import all machines on your network. Alternatively, you can set the wizard to look for specific machine types, like workstations, domain controllers, SQL or terminal servers and so on. Depending on your preferences, the wizard can add the detected machines to a new group or to an existing one and it can delete computers or perform other actions if it encounters conflicting names.

The application provides you with other useful options as well. You can find a few administrative tools, for accessing a computer's contents in Windows Explorer, viewing events and more. A series of network tools are available as well, for pinging one or more computers or performing other actions. What's more, Remote Shutdown allows you to add external tools, just by specifying the paths to their executables.