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Unfortunately XP home does not have a remote registry service, so remote admin is limited.
You cannot remotely view the event log for example. You can however remotely shut down an XP home computer.
XP home remote admin is governed by the ForceGuest registry setting, whereby remote connections are forced to be guest access even if the connection is with other credentials such as an administrator. for XP pro this is on by default, but for XP home it cannot be turned off – it appears to be a side effect of xp home simple file sharing, which also cannot be turned off. You can however get around this for remote shutdown, but only by making the Guest account an administrator, which carries significant risk (it will allow any PC on the workgroup to shutdown the target pc) but within a small family home workgroup may be deemed acceptable. Do this as follows :-
- To make Guest an administrator, enter Start/Run/Control userpasswords2. This opens the advanced user management control panel applet, from which you can open the properties for Guest and add it to the administrators group (you must also enable the account – it is disabled by default).
- Unfortunately, a side effect of this is that Guest then appears on the login screen, which in this case we definitely do not want. You can remove Guest from the login screen by adding the following registry value as a DWord with a value of 0 (zero) :-
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList\Guest
Note that this forum post describes the process. - Having performed these steps, you can then use the shutdown command from another machine in the workgroup. Shutdown /i from a command prompt will open gui mode which is more friendly, but this does not appear to allow the force (/f) option which forces application shutdown if apps are running. The following example will perform an immediate forced shutdown of the pc named TargetPC with a reason of “planned hardware maintenance” :-
shutdown /s /f /m \\TargetPC /t 0 /d p:1:1 - You can add the command to a batch file, but do not do as I did and name the file shutdown.bat, otherwise it will recursively call itself rather than perform the shutdown command!
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