Windows – How do you shutdown or restart a Windows computer over a Remote Desktop connection

Just run this from a remote session:

tscon %sessionname% /dest:console

The reasoning behind this is if you are working from a remote computer and you shut it down, how do you turn it back on? It is a "Safty" feature to prevent a remote computer from becoming in a unuseable state.

As for work arounds, shutdown really is the best way. You can always make a shortcut to the program with the command line arguments /s /t 0 included if you want a icon to do it. Or if you really must have a GUI you could have your shortcut be to shutdown /i, however I think that GUI is a lot more "abnormal" than typing something in the command line.

(One thing you may want to check, I don't have a windows 8 box in front of me to check, but from inside the RDP session do a Ctrl-Alt-End, this sends a Ctrl-Alt-Del to the remote computer and there may be a shutdown command from the menu that comes up)