Turning on the PC remotely is a common thing for corporate network administrators, who often find themselves in need of maintenance. The WOL (Wake on LAN, wake up from LAN in our language), as the name implies, allows you to wake up a computer that is in a low-power mode and connected to a LAN .
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This is a really convenient option that can always be useful to know how to use, in this guide we will see in more detail how it works and how to activate Wake on LAN on a Windows PC .
INDEX
- 1. How does Wake on LAN (WOL) work?
- 2. How to activate Wake on LAN?
- 3. How to use Wake on LAN?
How does Wake on LAN (WOL) work?
The operation of the WOL (Wake on LAN) is quite simple to understand : when the option is activated, the computer, even if suspended, is waiting for a “magic packet” (magic packet in English), which tells it to reactivate . Virtually every modern PC equipped with a LAN network card has the WOL option .
The protocol works quite simply, if the PC on the network is turned off it does not have an IP address, so it is identified by the MAC address of the network card (which is unique for each network card). This way you can be sure that the magic packet ends up on the correct PC you want to wake up and not on another one on the same network.
Unfortunately, WOL technically cannot work on wireless networks (unless you use a very small number of dedicated Wi-Fi cards that support it), so the computer must be connected to the network via ethernet cable. Although both networks use the MAC address, the frame formats are different: this means that there is additional information present in the header of the Wi-Fi frames that interfere and prevent the receiving PC from recognizing the “magic packet”. Lacking the recognition of the packet, the computer will not realize that it has received the command to turn on and obviously it will not. Sometimes to avoid hitches, it is advisable that the Wireless network card is deactivated leaving only the LAN connection active.
Attention , the Wake on LAN is only a wake up, so the system to wake up must be placed in suspension and not turned off.
After this brief introduction of a more technical nature, let’s examine how to practically activate the option.
How to activate Wake on LAN?
The first step is to enable the dedicated option in the BIOS settings. To do this, just restart the computer and when the PC is starting, before it shows anything, press the key to enter the motherboard BIOS menu . The key to do this is usually ” Del “, ” ESC “, ” F1 ” or ” F10 “, if not one of these it is advisable to refer to the documentation of the motherboard in use.
Once you are able to enter the BIOS, you need to look for the “ Power options ” energy settings and enable the “ Wake on LAN” option inside (it could also be called “ wake-up or network boot”) . The name and menu where the option is located varies at the discretion of motherboard manufacturers, if you do not find it please do a Google search by typing your motherboard model followed by the keyword ” WOL “. Once you have enabled the option you can save your settings and exit.
At this point you have to activate Wake on LAN also on Windows , here are the steps to take:
- once the PC has started, right-click on the Start menu and then in the menu that appears on “Device Manager”;
- expand the list of network cards and right-click on that LAN (often called ” PCIe Controller“) or the Wi-Fi card (if you have one of the rare models that supports WOL);
- then in the context menu click on ” Properties“;
- a new window will open, here go to the ” Energy Saving” tab ;
- find and activate the three options ” Allow the computer to turn off the device to save energy“, ” Allow the device to wake the computer “, ” Only allow Magic Packet to wake the computer “;
- then complete by clicking on “ Ok“.
Now that you have managed to activate Wake on LAN, however, you need to find out the MAC address of your network card , to do so:
- click on Start and type ” CMD“, then press the ” Enter ” key on the keyboard;
- then type or copy the command ” ipconfig / all” and press the ” Enter ” key on the keyboard;
- at this point you just need to find the network card in the list and copy its physical address (also using the key combination ” CTRL” + ” C “);
- keep the Mac address will be useful in the next paragraph.
The procedure to enable Wake on LAN is finished. We are therefore ready for the last part of our guide in which we will explain how to send the “magic packet” to wake up the PC.
How to use Wake on LAN?
After having activated Wake on LAN, using it is not difficult. First you have to use a PC on the same LAN to send the “magic packet”.
To use Wake on LAN from a PC you can do it directly from the CMD, using the WOL utility . If you want to use this method you must:
- open the Start menu, write “cmd” without quotes and press the “Enter” key on the keyboard;
- inside write the Wol.exe command ” mac address” ” ip address ” (without quotes) where instead of the mac address you have to put the mac address of the PC card to be awakened (we talked about how to get it in the last paragraph) and then the ‘IP address of the PC from which the wake-up command is sent (only if there are several network cards connected);
- once typed, press the ” Enter” key.
If you do not want to use the terminal and prefer a more immediate solution with a graphical interface, the free program WOL Magic Packet Sender could be for you . Just provide the program with the parameters of the PC to control in order to send the magic packet to command the computer to wake up.
If you are lucky enough to have a WiFi card that supports WOL and if you have activated Wake on LAN and configured it as mentioned above, you can also wake up your PC via a handy Android app called very prosaically WOL for Android . This utility is also free and simple to use, just enter the MAC Address of the Wireless network card of the PC to be awakened and the name of the WiFi network to which it is connecte
