Wake-on-Line is a network standard that allows a computer to be turned on by a network message, so called magic packet, that is usually sent by a program executed on another computer on the same local network. We’ve covered this technique before in a post How To Wake Up Online A Tuned Off Computer in Windows 7. Now, I am going to introduce a tool that handles this WOL business much easier.
WOL2 is free portable network tool acting like a Wake-on-Line manager that lets you to easily power on, reboot, or shutdown computers over a same LAN. It works on pretty much all Windows platforms including the latest Windows 8 & 8.1, both 32-bit and 64-bit are supported.
Since it’s portable, you can simply download it and extract the content to a convenient location, and launch it. If it’s a first time you are running the tool on a new network, click Edit → Scan for new hosts to scan the network to get all the live hosts listed in the program.
Depending on how many hosts you have in your network, it may take a little bit time to have the scanning process finished. Once it’s finished, it pulls all the hosts info and lists them all in the program.
You can add, update, or remove any of the listed hosts right in the program. Right-clicking on any of the host, you can fire up the command to wake, reboot, or shutdown that host. Super easy.
What’s interesting is that it can even be configured to control VNC, Putty, MSTSC (remote desktop), etc. I haven’t tested these features but if you do, feel free to drop a line here letting us know how it works.
WOL2 is an open source project. If you like it and happen to be an enthusiastic developer, you can lend a hand to help improve it.
I had to chuckle, you’re 2 bits short… 🙂 “both 32-bit and 62-bit …”
Haha…darn, they are two very important bits.