Optiplex 760/960 WOL Problems

I have exactly the same issue. A02 turns the lights off the lan when shutdown but if you pull the power cable out and plug it back in the lights come back on and you can then WOL lol.

Ive heard rummers this will be fixed in A04. Just a waiting game now

Ours shipped with the A02 BIOS and did turn off the NIC lights. After updating the BIOS to A03 the NIC lights remained on however WOL still did not work. My supervisor mentioned this to Dell Tier 3 support and they said that we "must have the BIOS set incorrectly". I went through every BIOS setting several time to confirm that I had them set properly. Surely there must be others that have this problem. I just wonder how long it will be until they release a new BIOS since A03 was released on 6/19/09.

Thats exactly what happened to me. through googling it i did find other people with this problem and they said wait for A04 so i am.

I found that by enabling the PME setting in the Intel NIC that I was able to remotely power on the computer now, even after powering own from Windows. I don't know if you have this set already but it may be worth checking into.

Yes your right enabling PME in the advance settings in xp for the network card fixed it. well done for finding that out. abit of a nightmare when you have just bought 60 of these machines though. weirdly vista does not have these settings but to get it to work for vista i had to enable the right power managment options in the networks hard ware properties in vista. seems that the bios and windows settings need to be working together now. this is may be why when you set the bios for the first time it works but then when you shut down the computer from windows it doesnt work because the windows settings over rule it.

We noticed that after we updated an Intel driver for the NIC that the WOL stopped working this was due to the PME setting being changed or added to our machines through the driver update. I did find the following on Intel's website. Well it's working so that's what I care about most. The new driver may not have applied to the Vista machines and maybe that is why it works still.

BIOS Settings There are various settings in the computer BIOS that may need to be configured before remote wake-up will work.

Many ACPI computers can be configured to work in APM mode. Check your BIOS settings to determine your operating mode.

In both APM and ACPI computers, you may find settings for Wake on LAN (WOL), generally under the Power Control area and titled "Wake on LAN" and/or "Wake on PME."  To enable remote wake-up, you should enable the setting that corresponds to the your adapter connection.

In ACPI computers, if you are using an ACPI aware OS (such as Windows* XP), and wish to be able to power up the system from a power off state, look for an ACPI specific setting such as "Wake on LAN from S5" and enable it.

Operating System Settings

Microsoft* Windows Products
Microsoft Windows NT* and Windows* 95 are not ACPI capable. Some settings will not be available in these operating systems. See also the "Other operating systems" section below.

Microsoft Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista are ACPI capable. These operating systems do not support wake from S5 state, only from standby. However, in some ACPI capable computers, the BIOS may have a setting that allows you to wake from an S5 state anyway. If there is no support for wake from S5 state in your BIOS settings, then you will be limited to wake from standby when utilizing these operating systems in ACPI computers.

In the adapters advanced settings, there is a setting titled "Enable PME." To explicitly allow wake up with a Magic Packet from shutdown under APM power management mode, set this to "Enable."

In ACPI capable versions of Windows, there will also be a setting titled "Wake on Settings." This controls the type of packets that will wake up the system from standby. Click the Help button in PROSet for a complete explanation.

In ACPI computers running ACPI aware operating systems such as Windows* XP, in Device Manager, the adapter properties will display a tab titled "Power Management." The setting "allow this device to bring the computer out of standby" should be checked.

Great, this was the solution.  But how do I go about changing this Enable PME setting on 1500 workstations?