Enable Wake On LAN (WOL) on all Dell PCs in your domain

Wake on LAN can be very useful for all Systems Administrators and Helpdesk. Do you remember last time when all your users were asked to logged off and none of them left their computers OFF? …….. No! thought so.

Well that can be solved, in my case I just have to deal with Dell computers so it was easy enough. I used the following method.

1. Download and install the following utility from Dell on one of the computers
   Dell Client Configuration Utility
   
2. Use the following instructions to prepare an exe file that can be deployed to all the Dell computers to modify BIOS settings to enable Wake on LAN.
   Create BIOS Settings Package
   
3. Once you have the BIOS settings file, use GPO or PSexec to deploy it to all computers.
   
4. And finally you can use a command line utility like WOL.EXE to wake up a computer (MAC address required)

To get the MAC address use following commandline
getmac /S computernam

the above was the most basic that can get anyone started with WOL, like Dell there are other manufactures that provide similar utilities to deploy BIOS settings or in some cases it might already be enabled. If you have Lansweeper or Configuration Manager in your domain then you can use these to wake up computers as well.