🌐💻⚡ Managing Network Adapter Power Wake-on-LAN with PowerShell

A detailed guide to configuring Wake-on-LAN using PowerShell, covering basic commands and troubleshooting common issues arising from differences in network adapter drivers.

Step 1: Device Identification.

Before configuring Wake-on-LAN (WOL) for a network adapter, you need to accurately identify which device you are working with. For this, we use a PowerShell command that searches for devices by part of their name (e.g., “Realtek” or “Intel”).

Get-PnpDevice | Where-Object { $_.FriendlyName -like "*Realtek*" } | Select-Object FriendlyName, Status, Class, InstanceId

This command tells the system: > “Show me all devices whose name contains the word «Realtek», and display a table with four columns for them: full name, status, class, and system ID.”

1. Get-PnpDevice: Retrieves a complete list of all Plug-and-Play devices.
2. | (Pipeline): Passes the list further.
3. Where-Object { ... }: Filters the list, keeping devices whose name (FriendlyName) contains “Realtek”.
4. | (Pipeline): Passes the filtered list.
5. Select-Object ...: Formats the output, showing only the necessary properties.

Find the desired device and take the first one from the list

$device = Get-PnpDevice | Where-Object { $_.FriendlyName -like "*Realtek*" } | Select-Object -First 1

*Write its properties to variables*

$DeviceName = $device.FriendlyName
$InstanceId = $device.InstanceId
$pmKey = "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\$InstanceId\Device Parameters"

Step 2: Global Wake-up Permission

The powercfg command gives the device “official” permission from Windows to wake up the system.

powercfg -deviceenablewake $DeviceName

This command is equivalent to checking the “Allow this device to wake the computer” box.

Its reverse action is disabling:

powercfg -devicedisablewake $DeviceName

Step 3: Driver Configuration.

WOL settings are located in the driver’s own parameters, which are stored in the registry. To check the box “Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer”,
use the Set-ItemProperty command.

# Set the property
Set-ItemProperty -Path $pmKey -Name "*WakeOnMagicPacket" -Value 1

Reverse action — disabling WOL (Value 0):

Set-ItemProperty -Path $pmKey -Name "*WakeOnMagicPacket" -Value 0

Problem The name of this parameter may differ among manufacturers. For example, for Intel it is *WakeOnMagicPacket, and for Realtek — WakeOnMagicPacket (without *). If the setting is not applied, check the correct name with the Get-ItemProperty -Path $pmKey command and use it.

Step 4: Final Configuration via CIM

To ensure that power management settings are applied correctly, we use the modern CIM (Common Information Model) standard.

# Find the CIM object associated with our device
$adapterCim = Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName MSPower_DeviceEnable | Where-Object { $_.InstanceName -like "*$($instanceId.Split('\')[-1])*" }

# Apply changes to it
if ($adapterCim) {
    Set-CimInstance -CimInstance $adapterCim -Property @{ Enable = $true }
}