Being an avid user of the Wake-On-Lan feature in Logmein and various utilities, I was not thrilled when I found that none were working in Windows 8 RTM version. I finally isolated the issue to a new feature in Windows 8 that allows for quicker boot times. Below is how I got it to work. Note: Disabling this feature does slow the boot times of some systems however in my systems using SSD’s, I could not discern much difference between it on or off.
- From the Windows “Start” menu, type”power options”, click on “Settings, and click on “Change what the Power Buttons Do”.
- Uncheck the option “Turn On Fast Startup”
Once you do that, your Wake-On-Lan should now work. I verified this using Logmein and it worked great. You will have to test your particular utilities to make sure that this corrects the issue.
I have tried to use Wake-On-Lan over the years with varying success. Asus MB’s don’t take kindly to it. Thus I leave my computers on all the time (Monitors sleep after 20 minutes). Apart from saving power is there other advantages of sending desktops to sleep?
Poppapete,
Thanks for the comments. I really use WOL to hard boot my computers and have never really put them to sleep. Programs like Logmein allow you to hard boot your PC using WOL. Since several of my PC’s have some heavy hardware such as graphic cards, I do not want to leave them on during the day. HTPC’s I leave on but the heavy gear. In response to your question, there is no other advantage other power savings. Two of my systems draw north of 150 watts each so they end up heating the room which leads into air conditioning issues as I live is SoCal. Basically I agree with you and have had limited success with sleep modes. Thanks for reading and the comments.
Mike
Hi Mike,
For me, this works when waking up from shutdown (ASUS P5Q Deluxe MB – with Marvell 88E8056 & 88E8001 network ports), but not from hybrid sleep or hibernate.
Has anyone had any success waking up a Windows 8 PC from these other states?
If there’s no solution, then as I favour the good old Windows 7 with functional Start menu over pointless metro ui only good for tablets then I’ll be upgrading back to 7 and have wake from any state working;-)
Phil