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I have an old WS that I turned into a dedicated plex transcoding server. It is running windows 7(64 bit) and has no onboard or dedicated graphics installed( to lower the power usage of an always on system ).

I am looking for a way to remotely run command lines/bats and I need to be able to kill the process and restart them.

I have tried windows remote desktop, and teamviewer

I can re-install the gpu if needed to do system updates / set up newer software. If there are some software packages to do this that I am not aware of.

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    Teamviewer, remote desktop, VNC etc etc all seem like good options? But if those worked perfectly for you then you would not be posting this question. So can you please add why not to use them or why you want to avoid a particular thing?
    – Hennes
    Jan 1, 2018 at 18:01
  • The issue is that when you remote in there is nothing rendering the desktop so the screen is black. Leaving me unable to control the computer.
    – steamace1
    Jan 1, 2018 at 18:03
  • Ah. I have used RD and TV in the past, but always with on motherboard graphics present. So I expected a 640x480 screen. Ok, that leaves a few options: 1) Windows terminal server might work (also never treid that without GPU). 2) Remote using telnet/ssh. 3) psexec (used to manage windows [servers] from the command line.. 4) Another OS which does not need a graphics card. E.g. Zen or vmware ESX (with windows running as a virtualised guest OS). 5). Since it it a workstation and not a desktop maybe it has iLO or DRAC management?
    – Hennes
    Jan 1, 2018 at 18:07
  • I think ssh might be the easiest option as the board doesnt support iLO or DRAC and psexec would be tricky since the old WS and my current have the exact same name. I'll go install a ssh server on it and see how well it works. Thank you for your suggestions.
    – steamace1
    Jan 1, 2018 at 18:21
  • According to this Microsoft blog post, RDP doesn't need a physical graphics card: "RDP plugs into the Windows graphics system the same way a real display driver does, except that, instead of being a driver for a physical video card, RDP is a virtual display driver". Are you sure you can't use Remote Desktop? (You can't use TeamViewer because it does depend on the physical GPU.)
    – I say Reinstate Monica
    Jan 1, 2018 at 19:35

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You should try Remote Desktop (again). It will work fine on a system without a graphics adapter as confirmed by this Microsoft blog post:

"RDP plugs into the Windows graphics system the same way a real display driver does, except that, instead of being a driver for a physical video card, RDP is a virtual display driver".

From your comment:

...[M]y issue with [Remote Desktop]...is that the user account...is a under privileged user that has [its] password disabled to [permit] automatically login on the event of a power failure / reboot.

I understand the account doesn't have a password so that Windows can login to the account automatically, but this also prevents using the account for Remote Desktop due to the security policy preventing network connections using accounts with blank passwords.

This can easily be solved by assigning a password which will enable Remote Desktop for that account (after you add it to the Remote Desktop Users group). Then configure the computer to automatically logon using the account and it's password.

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PowerShell has Enter-PSSession. It's going to take some work to get the computers to trust each other and configure Windows 7 for remote management but it's doable.

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