When administrators perform remote program installation on computer outside of their physical reach, or simply, perform some testing, sometimes they need to restart the computer in order to complete the installation or finish the work. Sometimes that’s not possible because the user might be away at that moment, and so the restart is unavailable.

Because of all of this, there is a little script that enables the highly needed restart. It is important to note that this action will result in the loss of all unsaved data, and you should check that everything is really saved.

The syntax for the remote restart command looks like this:

“C:\Program Files\Resource Kit\shutdown.exe” \\comp1 /R T:05 “standard restart” /C

If you wish to restart a group of computers (in the case of preventive server maintenance e.g. hardware swapping) you can create a batch file that looks like this:

@echo off
for /F “tokens=*” ” %%F in (names_of_computers.txt) do “C:\Program Files\Resource Kit\shutdown.exe” “%%F” /R /T:10 “standard restart” /C

Before running this script, it is necessary to create a text file in which to store the names of the computers. That file should look like this:

\\computer1
\\computer2
\\computer3

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Tags | Howto, Networking, Tips and Tricks, Windows