Assume that you on a holiday with your family. Suddenly you realised that you didn’t shut down your PC. You left your home while your PC was downloading a movie from torrent. Now, you want to shut it down. But, how? Is there a remote method to control your Windows PC, say by sending an Email or SMS?

TweetMyPC is there to help you. It will help you to access your PC remotely via SMS or through email. You can also access you PC using any device connected to internet.

All you need is a twitter account. You can create one at www.twitter.com . The software works by closely following your twitter postings – looks for desktop specific commands. So, initially you need to setup the software by providing your twitter account details (please see the figure given below).

The first version supports only basic utilities like shutdown, reboot etc. But the current version support many more utilities like control application and all.

First of all you need to create a new twitter account. You may ask – why a new one? Can’t I use my existing one? The reason is that you need to enable the ‘protect status updates’ feature in twitter, so that other can’t read the desktop specific commands. You can do this by going to the settings page and check the box next to the option – “Protect my Updates”.

Before we start with meddling with the application, install TweetMyPC in your PC and attach your Gmail and twitter account to it.

The software needs your twitter account for receiving the commands and email account will be used for handling information related to your desktop (say, the application currently running in your PC).

How to send commands:

You can send commands in the following ways:

By Email: Many of you might be using http://www.posterous.com. You can associate your twitter account with Prosperous.
From Internet: If you are on a vacation trip and have access you internet,
By SMS: You can sms the message to your account. See the twitter help page for numbers.
By IM: Add twitter@twitter.com to your list and send updates.

Commands:

ShutDown, Reboot, LogOff, Lock: No explanation is required for these!
Screenshot: To take the screen shot of your remote PC. You can view someone else is playing with it
Standby, Hibernate: Self explanatory!
Download <url>: Self explanatory! (Download any file remotely)
GetProcessList: You get the list of processes running and you can use kill <process id> to kill (stop) any process