Okay going to USA in a week and want to use my laptop over there, but i also want to be able to connect to my main pc to view files via "logmein". the problem is i dont want to be leaving my pc on for a whole week, i have read about WOL and that you can switch on your pc from sleep and start using it.. please does anyone know how this is done.

I have a netgear (sky) router
an asus motherboard with onboard Lan
win xp (pro)

and a pretty good idea how pc's work.. but everyone i have spoken to about this has said erm.. never tried it.. Shocked

i have just downloaded a program called WakeOnLanGui from http://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/wake-on-lan-gui.aspx dont know if anyone has used that before..??..

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Part of the reason is because it doesn't always work and it's a pain in the arse. As far as I can tell there's no ports to forward, it's just an "unusual" type of packet that gets sent.

Wikipedia has a good article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

and there's a couple of online WOL utilities here: http://www.rshut.com/products/wol/ and http://wol.dtools.net/

My best advice would be to use dyndns.org (your router probably supports dynamic dns services) so your PC has a name instead of an IP, just in case your IP changes while you're away. With regards to WOL, I've no idea if it's a feature that routers have to implicitly have or if they generally support it and it will need enabling in your BIOS as well.

Good luck, I think you'll need it

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According to the Wiki article, the "magic packet" that turns the PC on is a broadcast packet. To know what the broadcast address is within your subnet, you'd need to know your Internet address/subnet and then send it to the latest address in that subnet (for example, if your Internet facing address was 217.1.1.4 and your subnet was 255.255.255.240 - the broadcast address on that subnet is 217.1.1.15). This is fine on a corporate Internet connection where you are allocated a complete subnet however for home Internet connections, you're usually allocated a /32 address from your local ISP which means there is no broadcast address to use.

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