Source for remote control 13A plugs ...

That is one of the functions I use my Domia Lite for (same as ByeBye Standby so far as I can tell). The remote has four pairs of buttons and a selector slider. With the selector in position 1, I control three lights and TV (TV itself and cable box). In position 2, it controls a remote PC (and associated equipment) and the printer. So long as I leave the remote in position 1, all is well!

Mind, I have never needed to use the remote to switch off the PC - I have always found that a remote reboot has worked. But it does allow me to switch it off when it is not needed.

Put a 30A shower pullcord switch on the ceiling in the room below? ;-)

Owain

Bit of cat 5 , a switch and a remote 12v coil, Mains contact RELAY?

Or wire a LV relay across the reset switch?

I brought a set 3 sockets+remote from B&Q for £20. Seems to work fine I have one socket in the loft and as it works ultrasonically raqther than infa red it goes through the ceiling OK.

They also do single units and dimmer sockets too for remote controlling.

... and a battery (or 12V psu).

They are RF not ultrasonic.

Maplin are doing a set of 4 for £25 at the moment -

The problem you're likely to have with these things is that there's no feedback - so unless you can actually *see* the effect of turning something on and off (like I can with my outside light), you can't be 100% sure that it's actually *done* it. Although the ones I've got work pretty well, I occasionally have to press the button more than once to get them to operate when the socket is hidden behind furniture.

What about just extending the front panel power and reset push-button switches to a parallel set in the room below? They are just low voltage signals, not mains level switching (assuming an ATX or later PC, i.e. a Pentium or later).

Another thing -- my loft gets up to just shy of 50C when the Sun shines on it in the middle of summer. That's well over what I would be comfortable running a PC at. (I do have some low power microcontroller based electronics in the loft, but that doesn't generate enough power to get hotter than the ambient temperature, which is OK. I do also have a fan to keep the loft cool, but it doesn't make much of a dent in the kW's the sun pumps into it.)

I have thought about running a PC in the loft. If I did, I'd either build a box which was cooled by drawing cooler air from the rooms below or outdoor north side, or I'd work out how to duct such air directly into the PC case. Another option would be to fit much more powerful fans (noise doesn't matter much up there), but 50C is pushing it even for this -- I keep my server disks running at about 34C, and at over 50C, their average life would only be a fraction of that at 34C.

Run it off a USB port on a nearby computer.

We put a couple of pc's in the loft of our parents house about 7 years ago, bog standard pc's with just one mod of a 90mm thermostaticaly controlled case fan in each one,

they say on a board accross the joists about a foot from the roof, were put there as there was a cupboard in my bedroom below, where i fed it with power through the celing, and extended the front panel buttons to a little panel in the cupboard to reset it when needed.

They are still up there working as a server and adsl splitter to this day, (was installed before the easy availability of multi port adsl hubs and all that lot, origionaly split a 56k modem connection around the 7 pooters in the house.

we expected them not to last long due to the wild temperature variations, but they have lasted fine, when ever a hard disk size increase was needed we just added another disk, got about 5 in the server machine now and i think we retired the earliest ones as they were suck small capacity (were massive when we bought them of course)

Power cycling a Windows PC via the mains power input isn't to be recommended, because it can lead to disk corruption. You're supposed to shut it down (or restart it) gracefully from within Windows.

But OP didn't say he was going to NOT do a Windows shutdown, so I assumed he was (e.g. via RDP). Power cycling does appear necessary, just occasionally, for reasons that are anything but obvious. Some machines never seem to need it, others sometimes, and a few, quite often. Most often I find that a machine starts to closedown but somehow never quite terminates. Also, he might wish to switch machine off via RDP, then switch it back on remotely. That does require power off/power on.

Anyway, 'tis no different to power failure. Might not be something to choose to do, but rarely really causes a problem.

He might be running a less fragile OS ;-)

it doesn't matter what OS he's running: power cyckling is the only option when all other methods have failed.

That can be due to slightly malfunctioning hardware, or simply a obscure software bug.

I'm just trying to remember the last time I had to reboot a Solaris system because "all other methods have failed", bearing in mind that I've been responsible for thousands of them over decades. And the answer is ... so rarely does it happen that I cannot remember.

I had hundreds of SVr5 machines and we used to switch them off whenever we had an excuse.. it was one way of testing the journaling file system to see if it worked as required.