Keep computer awake for Remote Desktop

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.

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• Question

• When Remote Desktop is enabled, I'm unable to set the "Keep my PC awake for connections when it is plugged in" setting in Windows 10 Pro -- it's greyed out.  This is a standalone laptop, not on a network.

  Suggestions?

All replies

• Did you click Show Settings? This is a link the Power & Settings (not any separate setting)

• Hi,

  These settings are used by default, you can change detailed settings when clicking Show settings, but cannot checkout these settings.

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  • Proposed as answer by Tuesday, February 13, 2018 1:42 AM

Action

To use Remote Desktop, your campus computer must remain on and active. The instructions below will help you set the Windows power settings to keep this.

Instructions

1. Click on the Windows Start button
   
   
2. Click on the Settings gear
   
   
3. Click on System
   
   
4. On the left side of the window that appears, click on Power & Sleep
   
   
5. In the Sleep section, verify the setting for 'When plugged in, PC goes to sleep after" setting is set to Never
   
   
6. Do not shut your computer down if you wish to remotely access your computer.

If your computer turns off due to a power outage or other reason, you will need to visit it and turn it back on.

Does Remote Desktop working when computer is sleep?

Does Chrome Remote Desktop work when computer is asleep?