Keeping Windows accessible for remote desktop

Question

I have a Windows 10 PC that I would like to maintain accessible to remote desktop connections, at all times, no matter what. However, I can't seem to figure out the right combination of settings to achieve that.

Ideally, I would like the computer to be able to sleep, but make itself available on TCP/IP connections, magic packets over Ethernet, etc. I have both WiFi and Ethernet available to me as a means of connecting.

Here are the power management settings for the WiFi card. The device manager properties for the Ethernet has no corresponding "Power Management" tab (does that mean it's always on? no idea!).

1. Allow the computer to turn this device to save power

   • I want this setting off. Under no circumstances would I like the WiFi card to ever be off, whether the PC is in sleep mode or not. Frankly, I don't understand why anybody would ever want it to be on, the WiFi card probably draws a single watt at max, it's not like there are real energy savings to be had here.

2. Allow this device to wake the computer

   • I want this setting to be on. However, unchecking the first setting makes it inoperative and greys it out. I think the relationship here is inverted. If the PC is allowed to turn off the device, only then does it make sense to grey out the latter two settings (which couldn't work, because the device would be off.

3. Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer

   • I would like magic packets to wake the computer, but ideally, I would like any TCP connection to also wake it. So I would like this setting to be off.

My desired setting of (off, on, off) isn't possible. Is there something I'm missing here?

More generally, what can I do to achieve my goal, to have an always-accessible headless PC, that never requires a person to physically turn on or wake up?

For context, I'm basically looking for the equivalent of this single check box on macOS:

Answer 1

Wake on Wireless LAN (WoWLAN) seems to be very badly supported, so your problem may be with the wireless adapter rather than with Windows, meaning hardware rather than software. So let's trace it, both according to the sources and the Windows commands that you may also try out.

The Wikipedia term Wake-on-LAN says:

If the computer being awakened is communicating via Wi-Fi, a supplementary standard called Wake on Wireless LAN (WoWLAN) must be employed.[1]

The reference "[1]" that it points to is the article Wake on Wireless LAN. The Conclusions section at its end says this:

While technically feasible, Wake on Wireless LAN is saddled with severe limitations and lack of industry support. It is doubtful that most organizations could even consider a WoWLAN deployment unless running an environment composed entirely of Intel wireless adapters.

WoWLAN appears to have been a technology that missed wide adoption, but lives on through the learnings it provided. vPro stands ready to fill the gap, but requires newer hardware. I guess it's time to diligently update workstation requirements and purchase accordingly moving forward.

This is for reference checking. So now for some practice on Windows.

My wireless adapter behaves very similarly to yours, except that "Allow this device to wake the computer" is always grayed out in Device Manager.

Checking in the Details tab of the wireless adapter, in the property named "Power data", I can see the supported Power capabilities, where the only wake option is "PDCAP_WAKE_FROM_D0_SUPPORTED". Checking in Microsoft's article DevicePowerEnumDevices function, I find it defined as "The device supports waking from system power state D0". Going now to the article Device Power States I find that "D0 is the fully on state". Not a very useful capability.

My initial conclusion is that my wireless adapter does seem to support WoWLAN, in line with the information from the above article.

Further tests can be done using the powercfg command. The powercfg command can manipulate power settings, and in particular the sub-commands -deviceenablewake and -devicedisablewake can turn on and off "Allow this device to wake the computer".

Checking which devices are capable of doing this is with this command:

powercfg -devicequery wake_from_any

This command gave me a long list of devices, but my wireless adapter was not in it.

As a remark, to list devices that have the option currently enabled, use:

powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

As a last test, I started a Command Prompt run as Administrator and tried to enable the device:

powercfg -deviceenablewake "my wireless adapter"

and got the non-informative error message of:

You do not have permission to enable or disable device wake.

Conclusion: All attempts have failed, all indications are that my wireless adapter does not support WoWLAN. So for my adapter this is a lost cause.

Answer 2

I have a Windows 10 PC that I would like to maintain accessible to remote desktop connections, at all times.

Ideally, I would like the computer to be able to sleep.

Ideally, I would like the computer to be able to sleep, but make itself available on TCP/IP connections, magic packets over Ethernet, etc. I have both WiFi and Ethernet available to me as a means of connecting.

Remote Desktop does not have any built-in remote wake-up capability.

You would need to first use Wake on Lan to wake up the sleeping computer before you could RDP to it.

A sleeping computer's RAM is active but its CPU is not, so Remote Desktop would not work until you first wake the PC from its sleep state.

If you are willing to have to first use a Wake-on-LAN utility to wake your PC remotely, then you must wake it from sleep before connecting via Remote Desktop.

If you want to use Wake on LAN:

1) Connect your target PC via Ethernet.

2) Install a remote wake utility, such as this.

3) Use a remote wake utility to wake your target PC before initiating your Remote Desktop connection.

Wake on LAN works well and is easy to configure, just be sure to use it via Ethernet and not using the a wireless network adapter.