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I think I've tried all possible power modes (S0-S5), and WOL works for me in all of them... except when I use the Windows 10 "Fast startup" feature.

Supossedly this feature puts the system into S4 (hibernation), but it doesn't seem to be the case. Or at least, not exactly. I can WOL my system fine from a regular hibernation event.

Is there a trick to getting Windows 10 to play nice with the WOL feature while keeping the "Fast startup" option turned on?

PS. My current motherboard is an MSI B250 Mortar (latest BIOS at the time of writing). However, I've noticed identical behaviour on other systems with other motherboards.

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  • How do you configure the various power modes? I'd love to get WOL working again on my home PC and I periodically revisit the task every few months to see if anything has changed. I can wake my PC from sleep but not shutdown. That kind of indicates that the network card is configured fine and it's the well-documented shutdown power mode. My Asrock BIOS is configured to allow PCI Devices Power On and I've turned fast start-up off but still nothing from shutdown
    – munrobasher
    Oct 27, 2017 at 13:57
  • @munrobasher I'd say this warrants a new question but try regular hibernation first. You can enable regular hibernation from the same place where you configure fast start-up in Windows 10.
    – MBender
    Dec 17, 2017 at 11:32

3 Answers 3

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There is no supported way to enable WOL on shut down, only enable WOL on hibernation. Windows puts the system board on full shutdown, no matter if fast startup is enabled or not; that means zero energy on the system board.

Systems that can WOL while shut down are still giving residual energy to devices as the network card, even if that is not the intended system state.

Please check https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2776718/wake-on-lan-wol-behavior-in-windows-8-windows-8-1-and-windows-10 for a fuller answer.

PS: Logging off and hibernating act almost as intended by the Original Poster.

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It happens, because many motherboards and laptop computers (not all) acts in S4 state the same way, that they do in S3. So you can wake them up by pressing key or mouse move even from hibernation. The fast startup option mean to be as "transparent" to the user, that it can be, so this behaviour is of course not acceptable. So when Windows make hybrid shut down, it send also tiny halt instruction to all connectected devices before it send power down instruction to ACPI subsystem, which technically cut off the power. That's why WOL function does not work in hybrid shutdown modes. So why WOL feature does work in normal shutdown mode? Well in that case, Windows does not send halt instructions, because it does not have to - in normal power off mode you can't run computer by mouse move, keyboard etc (unless you set up your BIOS that way), so halt instructions are not necessery. Cheers, T.

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    That explains the "WHY". Any idea HOW to make Windows behave like a good boy and not turn off the devices (or, at least, not to disable the network card)?
    – MBender
    Jul 20, 2017 at 8:54
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    Well this is the problem. The way hibernation and hybrid shutdown modes works is hardcoded in ACPI subsystem, and as far as I know, there is no key in registry or config file that you can edit to append it. So we can only count on Microsoft, that they will do something about it in next updates. I personally do not use fast startup option, because I need my WOL working.
    – tomekszy
    Jul 22, 2017 at 9:05
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They now have a blog post. It's by design.

In Windows 10, the default shutdown behavior puts the system into the hybrid shutdown (also known as Fast Startup) state (S4), and all devices are put into D3. In this scenario, WOL from S4 or S5 is unsupported. Network adapters are explicitly not armed for WOL in these cases because users expect zero power consumption and battery drain in the shutdown state. This behavior removes the possibility of invalid wake-ups when an explicit shutdown is requested. Therefore, WOL is supported only from sleep (S3), or when the user explicitly requests to enter hibernate (S4) state in Windows 10. Although the target system power state is the same between hybrid shutdown and hibernates (S4), Windows will only explicitly disable WOL when it's a hybrid shutdown transition, and not during a hibernate transition.

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