How to Manage Power Management On All Workstations?

[TS]

We need users to be able to restart their machines, so we cannot
remove the shutdown option with group policy since that will also deny
them ability to restart the machines by themselves.

Many machines have been set to go into standby after 2 hours idle time
however, we need the machines to be accesible during the night for
software update services updates and whatnot.

Is there any way to either prevent the machines from going to
sleep/standby or else enable all machines with the "Allow this device
to bring the computer out of standby" option set on the network cards
properties in Device Manager without having to go to each machine and
configure them manually (this is preferred since it would save power
and yet allow the machines to be remotely administered, but we are
willing simply disable stanby period if that is much easier)?

 

[Tomasz Onyszko]

TS wrote:

Check this:
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_pm_ez_gpo

 

[TS]

TS wrote:

Check this:
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_pm_ez_gpo

OK, thanks. That may work for the turning off standby option.
Does anyone know if there is a way to control the setting that allows
the machines in standby to be woken up with just a ping to the IP
address? It is an option in the device manager, but I'd like to be
able to configure it via a registry change GPO instead of visiting
each machine and checking the boxes by hand.

 

[Andrew Mitchell]

(e-mail address removed) (TS) said

OK, thanks. That may work for the turning off standby option.
Does anyone know if there is a way to control the setting that allows
the machines in standby to be woken up with just a ping to the IP
address?

You can't do this by sending a ping (that I am aware of)
If the computer is asleep it has no IP address so there is nothing to send a
ping to. Setting the PC to allow any traffic on the NIC to wake up the PC
would cause everything (including broadcast) traffic to wake up the PC, which
is not what I think you are trying to do.

You could look at doing this via WOL (wake on lan). This sends a specific
packet to a MAC address, so it will work when the machine is powered off.
Have a look here for a utility called PowerOff.exe that will do this.
http://users.pandora.be/jbosman/applications.html