Here's a program I wrote to force a system shutdown. The idea for this came to me when I saw a need my sister-in-law had to be able to very easily, remotely shutdown her kids' laptops without tipping them off, which would happen if she used Windows' Remote Desktop feature.

Then I saw other uses for the software. Like if someone steals your laptop, you could just go to a (special) web site and set the status. When the thief turns the laptop on and it connects to the internet, it would see the status and shutdown, preventing the thief from using the laptop. Anyway, there are ways to circumvent the system, but someone would have to be relatively tech savvy to do so.

I haven't had the chance to test it out yet. I'm simply providing the current source code to show samples of what I'm working on. With that said, download the full source code here. Written in Visual C++ (no flames please). Runs on Windows XP and up.