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reboot PCs via Group Policy

Hello -

I've got about 100 PCs and would like to reboot them on a schedule of once a week. What is the best way to do this through Group Policy? Can I write a batch file with the shutdown -r command and somehow tie it to scheduled tasks? Do I need to script out the scheduled task part along with the shutdown command?

Any help would be greatly appreciated..
Thanks!

Todd Gerbert

I think SysInternals has a utility you can use to shutdown computers, http://www.sysinternals.com/, that will take a list of computers in an input file and reboot'em all. Then you can schedule just one task on a server.

snurker

Here is a link explaining it.

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/22695602/Schedule-a-PC-reboot-through-GPOs-at-a-given-time-of-day.html

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Adam Brown

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Adam Brown

Sorry, forgot to mention that you'll need to erase the entries in the csv file for computers you don't want to reboot.

Adam Brown

The utility mentioned by tgerbert is psshutdown and it will come with the download for psexec. The command for that is psshutdown @file computers.csv -u domain\user -r (doing this will prompt you for a password. The user you use has to have the right to shut down the system.)

Tech_Stig

Along with the SysInternals way, you can also make a batch script that holds a list of shutdown commands using the built-in shutdown command:

shutdown /m \\Computer1 /r
shutdown /m \\Computer2 /r
shutdown /m \\Computer3 /r