Hello everyone!  

New to the board here but was hoping that someone can help me out or if this is even possible...

I am playing around with Wake on LAN.  Everything seems to be working fine but I do have a few questions.  I noticed that if you do a Windows shutdown, the NIC will still stay active.  You can tell by checking out the link lights.  Do a Wake on LAN, and hooray, it turns on!

Now lets say that you push the power button on the machine for about 5 seconds, the machine will of course shutdown.  Now check out the NIC.  You will notice that the link lights are not on.  Try to do a Wake on LAN, and it will not work.  So it looks like pressing the power button will shutdown the NIC card as well. Any way to change this?

I am a Sys Admin in a big call center and one thing that I can't stand is when people shut off the machines.  I would love it to use the Wake on LAN feature and it seems like this would work unless the yahoos push and hold the power button on the machine which I am sure some are doing.

Fooling around with the power options under Windows (XP), you will see a "When the power button is pushed..." option.  I selected "Do Nothing" and of course when I push and hold the power button, the machine still turns off.  Doing more testing, it seems like this option will only work if you push and then let go of the power button.  That will help, but it would be great if there is some way I can keep the NIC active even after a shutdown via power button.  Any ideas?  Thoughts? Comments? Let me know, thank you.

    

The hard way--disconnect the wire from the power button from the mobo on frequently offending computers forcing them to use the soft shutdown, assuming the nic will remain active on a soft shutdown.