Switch on system at a particular time from shutdown

Question

I am looking for a software which can power on my Windows 7 desktop at a particular time, say 5am. I tried Auto Shutdown and Poweron software, but for some reason it is not able to switch on the system.

If it is not possible to switch on automatically from Shutdown state, power on from hibernate state will do.

Answer 1

Motherboards these days will support wake up timers by the OS. WOL isn't necessary to implement this.

Go into Control Panel and Select Change plan settings next to the power plan you want use.

Select Change settings that are currently unavailable then look for set allow wake timers. Enable it.

Then you can go into Task Scheduler to wake your computer.

The tasks in Task Scheduler have an option to explicitly allow "wake the computer to run this task." Unfortunately, there is no way to find out what tasks currently have this checked. There use to be a VBscript floating around that would do it, I'll have to dig that up later.

Answer 2

Some motherboards include this feature in their ROM-based setup program so it might be worth seeing if you can press a key to enter setup (often DEL, F2 or ESC) while the system is starting and have a look around.

If your motherboard or network adaptor supports 'Wake on Lan' (WOL) then you might be able to do this from your router; the How-to Geek has a bit on this:

http://www.howtogeek.com/70084/how-to-schedule-your-computer-to-wake-up-at-specific-times-with-dd-wrt/

If you have another PC that stays on you could schedule it to run a free WOL app (Google will help here) at the desired time.