Well, we are going to need Wake-on-LAN technique, an Ethernet computer networking standard that allows a computer to be turned on or woken up by a network message (AKA magic packet), to help us on this.
So, what do you need to make this happen?
1. the computer being woken up has a network card that supports Wake-on-Line technology.
2. make sure the feature is enabled on the network adapter property.
For example, in Windows 7, open Device Manager by clicking Start Menu and typing “devmgmt.msc” in the search box, and hitting Enter.
Find the network adapter that connects to the LAN under Network Adapters section, right click on it and go to Properties.
Make sure the property Wake on Magic Packet under Advanced tab is set to Enabled.
And make sure all options under Power Management tab are all checked.
Note that these settings are set to enabled and checked by default. Unless you have changed them, these settings should stay and you don’t have to do much.
On some computers, all you need to do is to make sure the Wake-on-LAN feature is turned on in BIOS.
And before you start
You also need to know the MAC address (physical address) of the computer you want to wake up. You can either get it from the classic “ipconfig /all” dos command
or remotely from a combination of using PING and ARP commands.
First, PING the IP address of the remote computer that you want to wake up
Second, ARP -a to list the MAC address of the IP addresses in list.
Now, we can get started
Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t seem to have a tool built in that can wake up a computer remotely but there are ways to get around it.
You can use a PowerShell script, which might be too much for a regular Windows user. Or, you can use this little tiny tool, a free portable tool that simply does only one thing, wakes your computer up, remotely.
You can easily download the tool from their website, extract it from the ZIP file, and run it.
Or, if you have many computers in your LAN that you would like to have the capability waking them up remotely when needed, you will have to look into a system management tool that does this work for you. For example, a well-known popular open source project Spiceworks that has the feature like this built in. I have been using it for quite a while and love it.
You may ask what if I want to wake up a computer REALLY remotely meaning across Internet. Take look this little web app. I haven’t tested but hope you will find it useful.
I recommend WOL2 (http://oette.wordpress.com/wol2/), which allows you to store and manage a list of hosts and includes a simple network scanner to collect all MAC addresses in a subnet.
Thanks Wolfgang for the sharing. Yes, WOL2 is a nice tool to have.
Cheers.
Further more, a PC can be wake up even from the Internet with a service http://wakeonlan.me
It can be done from another PC connected to the Internet or even mobile phone with HTTP or WAP browser.
When necessary it can be scheduled with this service site.
Can this be used to turn a computer ON that is completely powered OFF?
Or is it only for WAKING a SLEEPING computer?
yes, WOL can be used on a power offed computer that has connected to the Ethernet that has the proper configuration
For waking up PC/Laptop over Wireless WAN, this method may not work as Wake On Wireless LAN support is not wide spread. If it is ok for you to consider polling tools like RemoteWaker[1].
But pure software solution may not work over PURE shut down, but only over sleep/hibernate.
[1] http://www.remotewaker.com
I don’t see how I can use this.