Wake On Lan

Wake On Lan gives you the possibility of shutting down, turning on and performing other power-related actions on a computer, over a network. If you have a large number of computers on your hands, you can turn them on and off again when you need to, without getting up from your desk. The software comes with a few other tools as well, which can prove to be quite useful to system administrators.

The software is offered free of charge and it is also open source. You can have it up and running in about a minute, on Windows XP or any later editions, up to Windows 8. It doesn't use too many resources, but you have to make sure that your network card provides support for Wake on Magic Packet. Besides installing the software, you also need to make a few system tweaks, for which you can find instructions on the developer's website.

Wake On Lan allows you to manage multiple remote computers from a single user interface. They are represented with different icons, depending on their current power state. New hosts can be added by specifying a series of details, like MAC and IP address and others, on a separate window. To find remote hosts easier, the software comes with its own network scanner, which you can use to scan between specific IPs.

Once you have one or more hosts in your list, you can right click them and select different options to wake them or shut them down. You can also find an option for assuming control of remote desktops. When shutting down a host, you will a few more options to go through. The software allows you to set up a delay, send a message to the remote machine, force apps to close and choose an alternate action, like rebooting, sleeping or logging off, instead of shutting down. These actions can be performed on one remote host or on several machines simultaneously.

Another feature that will come in handy is the software's scheduler, which is quite flexible. You can set up triggers for various time intervals and choose from a wide range of actions which should be performed. The program can automatically start or shut down one or all computers, set them to sleep mode and so on.