Enabling Wake on LAN (WoL) on a Dell PC with a Realtek PCIe GBE NIC

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Computers that support the Wake-on-LAN (WoL or WOL) standard can be awoken from a sleep state by sending a "magic packet" to their network card from another system. For an Ethernet card, the packet is an Ethernet frame that is sent to all systems on the local area network (LAN). The packet contains 6 bytes of the hexadecimal value FF followed by 16 repetitions of the 48-bit media access control (MAC) address of the system to be awakened from a sleep state. I tried unsuccessfully on Friday to remotely "wake" a Dell PC from another PC by connecting to the other PC on the same LAN and then sending a magic packet to the sleeping computer using the Wake-on-LAN program from www.matcode.com—I no longer see a download link for the free software for Windows systems on the developer's website, but you can download it from a snapshot of the site taken by the Wayback Machine on December 19, 2007 at Wake-on-LAN where you can also find the utility MCGETMAC.EXE that will allow you to obtain the MAC address for a network interface card (NIC) on another computer, or you can download WakeMeOnLan, another free program for Windows systems created by Nir Sofer. After the user powered on her Dell computer this morning and left the office, I connected to her system remotely to verify that the system is configured to respond to a magic packet to wake it when it is sleeping. You can do so by the following steps:
  1. Open the Device Manager . You can view settings if you open the Device Manager from a regular user account, but if you need to change any setting you must open it from an administrator account. If you are logged in under a regular user account and don't want to logoff and login under an administrator account or remain logged in but switch to an administrator account, you can open a command prompt window as an administrator. Then, at the command prompt, type devmgmt.msc to open Device Manager under the administrator account. At a command prompt type devmgmt.msc and hit Enter. If you don't need to run it from another account, you can open the Device Mamager by typing Device Manager in the Windows "Type here to search" field and clicking on it when it is shown.

  2. Click on Network adaptors to see the list of network adapters on the system. In this case, the Ethernet adapter is the Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller.

    Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller

  3. Right-click on the relevant adapter and choose Properties, then click on the Power Mangement tab. The option to "Allow this device to wake the computer should be checked.

    Realtek - allow this devide to wake the computer

  4. Click on the Advanced tab and verify that the Shutdown Wake-On-Ln setting is "Enabled".

    Realtek - Shutdown WOL

  5. For the Realtek PCIe GBE network interface controller, verify that Wake on Magic Packet and Wake on pattern match are also set to "Enabled" and check that the WOL & Shutdown Link Speed is set to "10 Mbps First" as recommended by Dell at Wake On LAN (WOL) troubleshooting best practices.

After the above steps, you can close the Device Manager window.

Related articles:

  1. Obtaining a command prompt in Windows 10
    Created: February 18, 2017
  2. Wake On LAN using mc-wol
    Date: February 6, 2007
  3. Configuring a Windows Vista system for WOL
    Date: July 8, 2013
  4. Dell Precision 380 WOL
    Date: May 10, 2007

References:

  1. Wake On LAN (WOL) troubleshooting best practices
    Article Number: 000129137
    Last Published Date: 08 Jul 2021
    Dell