WakeOnLan

WakeOnLan is a command-line application that gives you the possibility to remotely wake up other computers in your local network by sending a WOL signal.

It's highly useful for network administrators looking for a way to easily turn on all machines without going through the trouble of attending each device.

Before proceeding any further, you should know that PCs can be woken up in this method only if WOL is allowed from their BIOS. Otherwise, WakeOnLan will not be operational.

It's not necessary to go through a setup operation, since the program is portable. You can save the downloaded files anywhere on the disk and just double-click the .exe to launch the remote start tool. You can also keep it stored on a thumb drive to effortlessly run it on any PC without previous setup. There are no software requirements involved.

To use this app, you have to call its process from Command Prompt or another console-based application you prefer. If you write only its name and extension, you'll get a list with the available commands.

The syntax is wol.exe -a macaddress [-b broadcast address] [-p port], where -a represents the MAC address of the remote computer you're trying to wake up, -b is the broadcast address (default is 255.255.255.255), and -p is the port number (default is 32767).

You must get hold of this information from the remote machine in order to use WakeOnLan successfully. Unlike other programs, it cannot scan the local network to obtain the list of all workstations, which would've been of great help.

Taking everything into account, WakeOnLan provides a simple method for turning on other computers in your local network by sending WOL signals from a console interface. It had minimal impact on the machine's performance in our tests.