Control your computer via a mobile for free

Imagine the scene, you’ve just left home and you’ve forgotten to turn your PC off. Tskk.. your local electricity company will be dancing with joy and your girlfriend could come home to see those “interesting” websites you’ve been viewing. What to do ? Do you turn around and go all the way back? Well, now there’s no need, because you can actually turn off your computer (and a whole lot more) by text message.


There’s no cost involved (apart from the text, obviously) and this tinkernut.com video excellently explains how to do everything. It works using a free website called kwiry.com to convert text messages to email. We found that sending an email directly from your handset (via SMTP or MMS) would obviously cut this step out, however texting is probably the easiest for everyone – even if you’ve got a Nokia 😉 At the heart of the solution is a simple Outlook message rule which looks for a keyword and then executes a batch file. A batch file is simple enough – it’s just a text file telling programs to run, so you can open up a browser, play some music or perhaps more – all controlled via your phone.


Whilst there are more advanced ways of controlling a PC from your mobile, this is a cool free way to do it. Let us know if you’re using this to get your computer running anything interesting or inventive!


Update – It looks like kwiry.com only works on US networks, so read on to learn how to get this working elsewhere!


Links – tinkernut.com video tutorial – kwiry.com (US only unfortunately)

Credit – DavidS2 (in this forum post)


For those who can’t sign up for kwiry.com, simply send an MMS instead.


First, add a contact – call it “My computer” or something like that. Add just an EMAIL address only into this new contact – make it your own, and add this new contact even if you’ve already got a contact for yourself with your email address on.


Now, when you want to shut down your machine (or execute another batch file), just create a new MMS with the subject of “shutdown” and send it to “My computer”. Job done.