Control Power State of a local or remote PC

Power Off is a freeware for Microsoft Windows that makes it easy to control the power state - that is on, off, standby and so on - on a local or remote computer. You can for instance configure it to set a certain power state when a process ends or schedule a change for a select week day or point in time.

And this is where it begins to be interesting. It is for instance possible to use Power Off to schedule work times for your children's PC. If you do not want them to play or work with it after 6 pm you could simply configure Power Off to shutdown the PC at that time.

I can think of several uses for running it on local computers as well. You may want to run defrag during the day which takes some time if you got big fragmented hard drives. You could turn on your computer in the morning, and configure Poweroff to turn off the computer once the defragmentation of the hard drive or drives has completed.

The program makes available the following options:

• Select the local computer or remote computer
• Actions: Logoff, Reboot, Shutdown, Poweroff, Standby, Hibernate, Lock, Wake-On-Lan, Turn off monitor, Turn on monitor, No action
• Options: Warning message, Run program, Force applications to close, Visible in tray, Allow cancel, Allow remote control
• When: Immediate, Scheduled, After a process stops

If you are selecting remote computer, you are asked to enter the computer name, NT username and password, as well as the port number of the remote computer.

Once you have selected the PC, you need to select at least one action, e.g. powering off the PC, and when you want the action to be performed. This can happen on schedule at a specific time of a day or after a select process stops running on the PC. To use the defrag example. You would need to start defrag first before you configure Poweroff to run an action after it completes its run.

Multiple options can be selected as well if you like. You can run another program for instance, enable remote control or display a warning message that informs users of impending changes.

Poweroff supports a variety of command line parameters that you can use. The homepage of the developer offers a full list of parameters for you to use. Basically, all actions that you can configure can also be run from the command line. A special set of remote commands is also listed there.

Verdict

PowerOff provides you with several ways to change the power state of a local or remote PC. Especially the option to schedule changes and the ability to link those to a running process need to be mentioned here. If you want more control, this program is for you.

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