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Think of this scenario; You are lying in bed and just finished watching a movie that you were streaming from a computer downstairs. You want to sleep, but you need to head downstairs to turn the computer off. Save some time, and do it from the computer upstairs.

There are a number of ways that you can restart or shutdown remote computers. You could use a remote desktop connection, but there are quicker ways and we will look at them today.

This article will show you various methods you can use to shutdown or restart computers on your network. We will look at:

• Command Line/Shortcuts
• Windows Tools
• 3^rd Party Applications

As well as looking after the environment and your pocket by saving electricity, it is surprisingly easy to achieve. This article is very much aimed at a home user. Most server operating systems have much more powerful tools available.

What you need:

All of the methods below require you to have an administrator account on the computer you want to shut down. This was a relief for me as I could see all sorts of ways this could be abused without such security.

All the methods below will require you to have either the IP address or machine name of the computer or computers you want to shutdown remotely.

All of the methods below were created using Windows XP. Vista offers the same commands and a few extras, while Windows 2000 has similar commands. If you use 2000, change the “-“ to a “/”.

Method 1: Command line

Microsoft has included a tool that comes with Windows that will be the focus of most of this article. I always like to use inbuilt utilities when they are available. In this case the command is “shutdown”.

If you open up a command prompt (Start > Run > Cmd) and type “shutdown”, you will see that there are a bundle of arguments you can use with the shutdown command. The -m argument followed by the machine name, and a -r(restart trigger) will shutdown your computer. The best way for me to explain it is through examples.

In the command prompt, try the following:

shutdown -m \\computername -s

Lets break it down:

1. The shutdown command gets the ball rolling
2. -m \\computername should be the name of the computer you want to shutdown.
3. -s tells the remote computer to Shutdown.

There are a number of other arguments you can use.

1. -r tells the remote computer to Restart
2. -l tells the remote computer to logoff

So that is all you need to know to do it from the command line. I find it a bit tricky to remember all the switches, so the methods below are more ideal for me.

Method 2: Shortcuts

This method uses the same “shutdown” command as above. The only difference is that we put the command into a shortcut so that we can launch it quickly.

Right click on your desktop
Select “New”
Select “Shortcut”
In the path put in:

shutdown -m \\computername -s

Call it whatever you want and change the icon if you would like.

Now you have a shortcut that when it is launched will shutdown the remote computer. How easy is that!

Method 3: Windows Tools

The “shutdown” command we have been looking at above has a graphical front end with a few nice features in it. If you have multiple computers you want to shut down, this may be a good option for you.

To get into it, open a command prompt and type “shutdown -i”

The graphical front-end will open up.

In here, you will see the same options available to you as the manual methods above, but this time you can list or browse multiple computers on your network and do bulk shutdowns or restarts.

It is fairly self explanatory, so I won’t go into it much more. It isn’t all that powerful. Check out another utility below.

This method requires you to put in a reason as to why you are restarting/shutting down. It’s a real pain.

Method 4: External utilities

RCL– Remote Computer Log On is a program I came across while scouring through SourceForge. It doesn’t look like much, but it is much more powerful and user friendly than the options above.

RCL was originally designed by a school teacher to control the computers in a computer lab. RCL offers no annoying fonts or popups. It makes up for them in features.

You can login/out, shutdown or restart multiple computers. There is even a feature to enable or disable Internet access.

The computer list uses text files making it easy to list groups of computers; i.e. one file for each lab.

It may be more than you want, but I am definitely going to be using this gem. If only I had it 3 years ago. Download it from SourceForge.

Another program of note is XP remote Timer. It runs much the same as the shutdown command but it offers a timer feature. It might be a good way to control how much time the kids use their computer.

Which method is right for me?

When this article was suggested to me, shortcuts seemed like the most practical way to control 1 or 2 remote computers. As the amount of computers increased, the graphical utilities won out.

Note:

Windows has inbuilt power management features which you might choose to use to shutdown a machine automatically when it is not in use for a certain period of time. This would achieve the same thing, but it removes the control you can have.

Microsoft demos IE9 hardware acceleration vs Safari 5

Microsoft has issued its response to Apple's recent Safari 5 release, demonstrating Internet Explorer 9's hardware acceleration abilities.

In a blog posting on Tuesday, Microsoft blogger Brandon LeBlanc posted a video comparing Internet Explorer 9 and Safari 5. "Apple announced and released Safari 5. We figured we would show IE9 and Safari 5 together", said LeBlanc. A video shows the two browsers running demos from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 test drive website.

The first demo used is the flying images JavaScript demo. Internet Explorer 9 manages around 50fps with Safari 5 struggling at 9fps. The second and final demo is the Flickr Explorer test. Internet Explorer 9 hovers around the 20fps mark whilst Safari 5 stays around 7fps throughout the test. Microsoft is currently developing Internet Explorer 9 internally and has issued preview builds for developers. LeBlanc also revealed that Microsoft has seen over a million downloads for the Internet Explorer 9 developer preview so far.

Google introduces new search indexing system - Caffeine

Google announced on Tuesday the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine.

Google claims that Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than their last index. "It's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before", said Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer at Google.

Google has built a new search indexing system as web content is growing in size and is more diverse in the form of video, images, news and real time updates. To keep up, Google has built Caffeine. The old index had several layers (see image above) that updated at different rates to others. To refresh a layer of the old index, Google would analyze the entire web which meant there was a significant delay between when Google found a page and when it was available on its search pages for end users.

With Caffeine, Google analzyes small portions of the web and updates the index on a continuous basis. Every second, Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. Google claims you'd need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information.

Users who search on Google.com should see improvements in the months to come.

In Apple's market cap success, beating Microsoft means nothing

It would seem that May 26, 2010 will be forever considered a day of joy for Apple fans. Many see this day as the time when Apple was able to overtake Microsoft, when the underdog finally bested the incumbent. Late in the afternoon, the market capitalization of Apple (AAPL) crept ever so slightly past Microsoft (MSFT), and set off a celebratory tsunami of blog posts, tweets, Facebook statuses, and obligatory internet forum flame wars. It was almost like Apple fans thought they ‘defeated’ Microsoft in some way. And maybe they did. Market capitalization is a very common and practical tool for evaluating the market worth of a company, both for its ease of use and its ability to quickly give a snapshot the attitude of investors about a company. Specifically, market capitalization is the price of a company’s share multiplied by its total outstanding shares. This allows for the size of a company to be factored into the determination of its value, rather than just the share price alone (Google may have a much higher stock price than, say, Wal-Mart, but that doesn’t say anything about the value of the company in and of itself, due to the sheer size of Wal-Mart). Apple’s stock price has been higher than Microsoft for quite some now, and the reason why that alone didn’t cause as much reaction is because just comparing stock prices doesn’t take into account Microsoft’s size. It’s more important that Apple’s market cap rose above Microsoft, because it’s a more comprehensive evaluation of investment worth. It means that even though Apple is a smaller company, with a much smaller market share and product base, investors still see Apple as a company worth investing in more than Microsoft.

The amount of hype this particular piece of news is generating boggles my mind. Considering the huge consecutive successes Apple has experienced since Jobs retook the throne, which drove market confidence up and up again and again, the fact that Apple became an investor’s gold mine is not surprising in the least. When a company releases an iPod, an iPhone, and then an iPad, each taking the retail market by storm and consuming almost miraculous amounts of market share in their respective segments, financial forecasts will skyrocket. Despite all the controversy surrounding their behavior in certain areas of market etiquette and established wisdom surrounding open-source ideas and policies, Apple has consistently released products that people love. They’ve made product releases an art and a science, and it’s a symphony of beautiful music to investors’ ears. Apple is completely deserving of the accolades, and I wouldn’t dare take the credit away. What I don’t understand is how this has anything to do with Microsoft.

For a long time, it was Apple vs. Microsoft, Jobs vs. Gates, Windows vs. Mac OS, and PC vs. Macintosh. Microsoft made an OS, and it was very successful; Apple made an OS, it tried to compete, and generally failed in the market. In those heady days of old, both companies were software companies. Now, not so much. Apple’s return to the limelight after a few years in exile under a different CEO was marked by the release of a mobile digital music player. While OS X was a huge step in the right direction as far as mainstreaming the OS, nothing brought in revenue and visibility like the iPod. The iPod is one of those rare products that are so pervasive in the consumer market that even music devices that aren’t iPods are called iPods by many people (Think Kleenex, Nerf guns, Band Aids, or “I’ll Google that”). On the heels of the iPod and its various critically acclaimed upgrades came the iPhone, pushing Apple further into dominance in the mobile device market. In fact, Apple COO Tim Cook believes that Apple should be seen as a mobile device company. Following the one-two punch of the iPod and iPhone, the iPad is released, once more dominating the market and selling its first million in less than a month.

While Apple was busy reinventing itself as the mobile device company everyone wanted to emulate, Microsoft took its utter and total domination of the OS market and entrenched itself in the enterprise world. While everyone can agree that Windows Vista was a failure on many counts, and possibly one of the key factors behind the decline of their market cap and overall financial performance, businesses, where the bulk of computing happens, just stuck with XP and waited out the storm. Windows Server 2003 and all its numerous and varied enterprise management tools is what IT professionals use, period. There is no viable substitute for Active Directory, and there is nothing on the horizon that is even thinking about invading that territory. Windows Server 2008 is becoming very popular in the enterprise, especially for its virtualization capabilities, and it’s a matter of time (and a service pack or two) before Windows 7 takes the place of XP as the leading corporate OS. The world’s businesses run on Windows, and that’s where Microsoft has succeeded more than anywhere else. Just the opposite of Apple, every piece of hardware Microsoft puts out seems to be doomed to market failure, and the Zune and Kin platforms are perfect examples of that.

You see, we’re comparing apples and oranges (pun definitely intended). The symbolic accomplishment of Apple achieving a higher market cap than Microsoft is fueled by memories of the war that these two technology visionaries once fought long ago. While Mac OS market share is growing, it isn’t even close to becoming a threat to the Windows platform, and Apple understands that. The fact that the Apple has ascended to a cool 2^nd place in the US market capitalization standings is big deal. The fact that they beat Microsoft doesn’t mean anything in the context of Apple winning the old OS wars.

Apple’s market cap conquest will be thrown around for a while as ammunition for the biggest tech flame war of our time. It will be a buzzword in Internet forums when Apple fans want to prove their superiority over Microsoft. It’s a misplaced victory, however, and the fans should be celebrating the fact that their market cap is 2^nd in the country, period. Spinning the victory as a defeat to Microsoft only weakens the real meaning behind the success, and completely misinterprets the perceived competition between Microsoft and Apple.

New iPhone vulnerability leaves your data wide open

A new vulnerability has been revealed today that can access your data on your iPhone, even when your phone is in a locked and un-jailbroken state. PIN codes to protect users from accessing your phone won't stop the vulnerability, according to Engadget.

Bernd Marienfeldt and Jim Herbeck discovered the vulnerability, and said it can even access most of the users data. The vulnerability can even work on an iPhone 3GS running firmware 3.1.3, when you connect it to a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, even when the phone is in a locked state.

This vulnerability can't be spread like the iPhone iRickRoll'd worm, which changed users backgrounds on their jailbroken iPhones, running SSH and who haven't changed their default password. This new vulnerability appears to only be when the phone is tethered to a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, so any person wanting your data will need to get a hold of your iPhone first.

With open vulnerabilities like this, Apple will find it hard to turn the iPhone into a prime-time corporate device, where companies like BlackBerry have proven to be reliable and secure. Apple has yet to address the vulnerability or release a patch.