Lucky for us, Microsoft MVP Helge Klein has written a successor utility called DelProf2 that works with newer operating systems, such as Windows 7. DelProf2 works with Windows XP/2003/Vista/Windows 7/Windows 2008/Windows 2008R2.

DelProf2 will even handle profiles that use long paths (i.e. MAX_PATH values of longer than 260). This tool is great if you want to get rid of old profiles that are taking disk space. It will delete all profiles except the current profile. It will leave the necessary system profiles (e.g. Default profile) alone. Default profile is used by the operating system to create a profile for a new user by making a copy of the Default profile. You also have the option to delete locally cached copies of roaming profiles or delete older profiles that have not been used for a certain period of time, such as older than 90 days.

Here is the syntax used by DelProf2.

Usage: delprof2 [/u] [/q] [/i] [/p] [/r] [/c:[\\]<computername>] [/d:<days>]

       /u   Unattended (no confirmation)
       /q   Quiet (no output and no confirmation)
       /i   Ignore errors, continue deleting
       /p   Prompt for confirmation before deleting each profile
       /r   Delete local caches of roaming profiles only, not local profiles
       /c   Delete on remote computer instead of local machine
       /d   Delete only profiles not used in x days
       /l   List only, do not delete (what-if mode)

Helge has some nice examples on his site. You can use DelProf2 to delete inactive profiles remotely (including Windows 7 computers) using their IP addresses.

DelProf2 is a free utility that can be downloaded from Helge’s Web site here. While you are at it, you might want to check out some additional tools that he has written.

You can download the tool here.

For example, you can remotely reboot a Windows 7 computer from a Windows XP computer as long as you have administrative privileges. On the destination computer, you may need to ensure that your account has the user right “Force shutdown from a remote system.” You can run gpedit.msc at the Start, Run and then add your account to that user right, as shown in the screenshot below.

The shutdown is especially handy for Network Administrators and PC Support professionals in a domain environment. Here’s the syntax used by the shutdown utility.

C:\> shutdown /?

Usage: shutdown [-i | -l | -s | -r | -a] [-f] [-m \\computername] [-t xx] [-c "comment"] [-d up:xx:yy]

No args                 Display this message (same as -?)
-i                      Display GUI interface, must be the first option
-l                      Log off (cannot be used with -m option)
-s                      Shutdown the computer
-r                      Shutdown and restart the computer
-a                      Abort a system shutdown
-m \\computername       Remote computer to shutdown/restart/abort
-t xx                   Set timeout for shutdown to xx seconds
-c “comment”            Shutdown comment (maximum of 127 characters)
-f                      Forces running applications to close without warning
-d [u][p]:xx:yy         The reason code for the shutdown
u is the user code
p is a planned shutdown code
xx is the major reason code (positive integer less than 256)
yy is the minor reason code (positive integer less than 65536)

To restart a computer make sure you use -r, to shutdown the computer use -s. As mentioned earlier, the shutdown command can be used on a local or a remote computer. To restart a remote computer use -m \\computername. For example, if you have a computer that’s hung on a certain process and you can’t even remote desktop into it, you can try to restart the computer remotely and force running applications to close without warning by using the following command.

shutdown -m \\computername -r -f

If you want to use the GUI version, simply type shutdown -i to bring up the graphical interface. Here you can add, one or more computers, configure the option to Restart, Shutdown, or Loggoff, display a warning notice on the computer, configure the computer to reboot after a specific interval, and configure the option for Shutdown Event Tracker that will record the reason for the action in the Event Viewer.

I mentioned at the beginning of the article that you can use Shutdown utility on Windows 2000 and later computers. Microsoft’s KB article 317371 explains how to use Shutdown tool in Windows 2000. However, notice that the older utility used a forward slash (/) instead of a hyphen (-) for the switches.

You can also download a PDF version of this glossary here.

If you have more than one remote access server, rather than administer the remote access policies of all the remote access servers separately, you can configure a single server with the Internet Authentication Service (IAS) as a Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) server and configure the remote access servers as RADIUS clients. The IAS server provides centralized remote access authentication, authorization, accounting, and auditing. This provides a powerful way to centralize remote access policies, especially in large distributed environments.

When you configure the properties of the server running Routing and Remote Access, select RADIUS authentication as the authentication provider. Once the remote access servers are configured to use RADIUS authentication, the remote access policies stored on the remote access servers are no longer used. Instead, the remote access policies stored on the IAS server are used. Therefore, if one of the remote access servers contains the current set of remote access policies that are applied to all of the remote access servers, you can copy the remote access policies to the IAS server. Click here for the step-by-step procedure for copying the remote access policies to another server.