How to wake your gaming PC remotely
A gaming rig is the machine you least want idling and most want available. The arrangement is the one you would set up by hand if you had the evening: it sleeps at about three watts whenever nobody is on it, stays awake while a session or a download is genuinely running, and drops back to sleep after you stop. Getting it back is the step that depends on the hardware — Wake-on-LAN brings it up in a couple of seconds from wherever you are, on a wired rig, and this guide covers the Wi-Fi and Mac cases too.
This guide is the whole setup, in order: the settings that make a PC wakeable at all, the four things that can send the wake from outside the house, how to have the streaming client open the moment the machine is genuinely up rather than a hopeful few seconds later, and how it goes back to sleep when you stop. It ends with what changes if the rig is a Mac or a laptop, and the seven reasons a wake does nothing.
Get the PC wakeable first — this is where it usually goes wrong
Nothing else on this page matters until the machine actually responds to a packet on your own network. Four settings account for almost every failure, and they are worth doing in this order because each can mask the next. With the free agent on the PC, the Wake readiness section in the machine's settings on the dashboard reads the fast-startup and adapter settings for you and offers to fix both — on a Linux rig, the adapter setting alone, there being no fast startup to turn off.
- Use Ethernet if you possibly can. Waking over Wi-Fi means WoWLAN, which depends on the adapter, the driver and how your router handles key rotation. We do not promise it. A cable turns a maybe into a yes, and on a gaming machine you probably wanted the cable anyway.
- Turn off Windows fast startup. It makes "Shut down" a partial hibernation, and in that state most network cards will not wake. It is on by default. Control Panel, Power Options, Choose what the power buttons do, Change settings that are currently unavailable, then untick Turn on fast startup.
- Enable wake in the BIOS. Boards call it Wake on PCI-E, Power On By PCI-E/PCI, Resume by LAN or Wake on LAN. While you are there, disable ErP Ready or EuP 2013 if the option exists — it cuts standby power to the network card and quietly undoes everything else.
- Tick the adapter checkbox. In Device Manager, on the Ethernet adapter, Power Management, Allow this device to wake the computer. Some drivers also carry a separate Wake on Magic Packet setting under Advanced.
- Take the right MAC address. Run
getmac /vand use the Physical Address of the Ethernet row — not a VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V, WSL or VPN adapter. Giving a wake service a virtual adapter's address is the single most common reason a correctly configured machine never wakes.
Then send the wake from outside the house
A magic packet is a local broadcast, so something on your own network has to put it there — routers will not carry one in from the internet, and forwarding a port to try is both unreliable and a genuinely bad idea. What works is a small emitter inside the network holding an outbound connection out to a service, so your phone talks to the service and the service talks down the connection your network already opened.
Four things can do that job, and none of them is the gaming PC itself. An Echo you already own: our free, certified Alexa skill has it broadcast the packet, by voice or a tap in the Alexa app, and by nothing else. The free agent on something you already leave on — a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, a mini PC, a home server — which turns that box into the sender for every other machine in the house; it cannot wake the machine it runs on, so it is never the rig's own route. A certified smart plug, on the paid plans, for a rig set to start when power returns — and the only route for a machine that is fully off. And a dongle you build, a Raspberry Pi Pico W in a printed case on about half a watt, for the very common case where a gaming household has nothing else running overnight. Either way, nothing is installed on the gaming PC to wake it. The plain, any-machine version of the whole loop — every sender, the Mac and laptop cases, and the six reasons a wake fails — is how to wake a PC remotely.
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
| Then send the wake from outside the house | What it costs | What can trigger it | The one limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| An Amazon Echo you already ownOur free, certified Alexa skill has the Echo broadcast the packet on your home network — from the sofa by voice, from the train in the Alexa app. | Nothing | "Alexa, turn on the study PC", and a tap in the Alexa app from anywhere in the world. | Voice and the Alexa app only. The dashboard, the phone app, schedules, wake links on Pro, the API and the Claude connector all need one of the rows below. |
| The free agent on a machine that already stays onA NAS, a Raspberry Pi, a Home Assistant box, a mini PC — or a container on any of them. Never the rig itself: an agent cannot wake the machine it runs on. | Nothing | Everything: the dashboard, the phone app, voice and the Claude connector — plus schedules and the API on the paid plans, and wake links on Pro. | Needs a machine that stays on. An agent cannot wake the machine it runs on. |
| A certified smart plugFor a rig set to start when power is applied — most desktop boards can be, under a BIOS name like Restore AC Power Loss or AC BACK — and the one route for a machine that is fully off. The certified models. | About £10 | Power on and power cycle from the dashboard, through an agent or dongle that reaches the plug — on the paid plans. | The machine must start when power returns: a cold boot, not a resume. |
| A dongle you buildA Raspberry Pi Pico W and a few parts, for the household where nothing else stays on overnight. The parts list names them. | About £17 in parts | Everything the agent carries. | A small build: flash it from your browser, print or buy a case. |
Wake and connect in one motion
The annoying part of remote play is not the wake, it is the fifteen seconds afterwards where you do not know whether to start the client yet. Rooster Wake closes that with a connect link stored against the machine: put your streaming or remote-desktop client's own link on the machine — moonlight://, parsec://, an rdp:// address, ssh://, vnc://, or a plain URL — and the row carries a Remote Desktop button that opens it, whatever the link's scheme.
Press it while the rig is asleep and the button does the whole motion: it sends the wake, watches for the machine to come up, and opens the link the moment it has. Two things make that work. The free agent on the gaming PC is what says it is up — the row turns green, up now — agent connected, usually within twenty seconds, on every plan — and without it the button gives up after two minutes, because the packet itself never reports back. And on Plus and Pro the button holds the machine awake for ten minutes while you sign in, so a rig woken and then left for a moment does not doze off before the client connects.
Two boundaries. Storing the link is free on every plan, and the wake and the watch are too; what the free plan does not have is the confirmation probe on your own network, on Plus and Pro, which reports that the machine came up or that it did not and why. And the connection itself is not ours: the button launches whichever client the link names, so that client still has to be installed and able to reach the machine.
One piece of grammar that catches people out: Microsoft's Remote Desktop apps refuse a bare rdp://name. They want the attribute form with the inner colons encoded — rdp://full%20address=s%3A192.168.1.20%3A3389 — and on a home network you generally want the IP rather than the machine name.
Putting it back to sleep when you are done
Waking is free physics; sleeping is software, because something on the machine has to ask the operating system to suspend. Install the agent on the gaming PC as well and its row carries Sleep: press it from your phone when you finish playing and the rig suspends in seconds. The free plan includes ten sleeps a calendar month; Plus and Pro are unmetered and add Restart… and Shut down… beside it — which is what makes the whole arrangement worth setting up, since a rig that wakes remotely but only sleeps when you walk over to it is a rig that stays on.
Keep awake…, on Plus and Pro, is the other half: hold the rig up for a download or a long session, and the row shows the deadline. When the timer ends, or the remote session that was holding it ends, the machine goes back to sleep by itself unless somebody is using it — on Windows, macOS and Linux. A rig on a certified plug shuts down cleanly instead, because it comes back by cold boot rather than resume, and the switch stays on for the next Wake to cycle it.
The agent on the gaming PC cannot wake the machine it runs on — asleep, it is asleep along with it — so it does not replace the emitter on your always-on box or the dongle. The two do different jobs: one puts the machine to sleep, the other wakes it back up.
If the rig is a Mac, or a laptop
A Mac wakes by packet over Ethernet only, from sleep only, and never from full power-off. Turn on Wake for network access — or let the free agent on the Mac do it: Prepare for wake, in the row's Wake readiness section — keep it on mains and on a cable, and every sender above brings it back from sleep as it would a PC. An Apple-silicon Mac mini or Mac Studio used as a streaming host starts when power is applied, so a certified plug on the paid plans is its route from off, with the same green Wake.
A MacBook, or a gaming laptop on Wi-Fi, cannot be woken by packet at all. A laptop on a dock with a cable is a desktop for these purposes; off the dock, nothing on this page reaches it. The handheld or laptop you are streaming to is not the problem — it is awake in your hands. Only the host has to be wakeable.
When the wake does nothing
Nearly every "it does not wake" is one of these seven, each with a check you can run at the desk before you are back on the sofa with the handheld. Work down the list: the top ones are the most common, and each can mask the next.
- The adapter setting is off. Check Device Manager, the Ethernet adapter: Allow this device to wake the computer ticked under Power Management, Wake on Magic Packet Enabled under Advanced. A driver update can silently reset both; with the free agent on the machine, the dashboard's Wake readiness section catches it and offers the fix.
- Fast startup is on, and you shut down. The machine is hibernated, not off, and the card is parked un-armed. Check Choose what the power buttons do: Turn on fast startup unticked. Or sleep the machine instead — sleep is the state the packet is best at.
- The machine was off, not asleep. From full power-off a PC listens only if the BIOS keeps the card fed and the driver's after-shutdown wake is on; a Mac never listens. Check: sleep it, send the wake, and if that works the missing setting is the BIOS one.
- It is on Wi-Fi. Check whether the cable is in. Waking over Wi-Fi works from sleep only when it works at all, and never on a laptop.
- Wrong network. A broadcast does not cross a VLAN, a guest Wi-Fi, a client-isolated network or, on some mesh systems, a different node. Check that the sender and the machine share a segment — same switch, off the guest network.
- A BIOS power setting. ErP Ready, EuP 2013, deep sleep, or a mode that cuts the standby rail. Check the BIOS's power page with all of those off and Wake on LAN on — and take the right address:
getmac /v, the Ethernet row, never a virtual adapter's. - A power plan hibernated it, or the rig is on Wi-Fi only. A Power saver plan, or a Hibernate after timer on any plan, turns a sleeping PC into a hibernated one a few hours in, and hibernated it is parked the way fast startup parks it — the packet that woke it at eleven does nothing at two. Check Power Options, Change plan settings, Change advanced power settings, Sleep, Hibernate after: Never. And a rig on Wi-Fi only is the cable case above with no cable to run: a certified plug on the paid plans wakes it by cold boot, and when a keep-awake timer on the paid plans runs out it shuts down cleanly, switch on, rather than sleeping into a state nothing could wake it from.
What it costs to leave it on instead
A gaming desktop idling at the desktop with the monitors off is commonly 60 to 120 watts, and considerably more if background applications keep the graphics card from dropping to its low-power state. Asleep, it is two to five. Over a year the difference is several hundred kilowatt-hours — multiply by your own tariff, because that is the only figure that matters and nobody else knows it.
The other half is not measured in money. A machine that sleeps between sessions is quieter, cooler, pulls less dust through its filters, and is not running its fans at 3 a.m. in a bedroom.
If your machine is a different shape of problem — a work desktop you need from a hotel, a fleet to patch overnight, a server in a cupboard — who uses Wake-on-LAN maps the six common ones and points at the guide for each.