We’re in a thread that was started by someone complaining that their Windows machine kept waking up seemingly on its own when they put it to sleep, so how wake on LAN behaves for a computer that’s completely shut down was never particularly relevant, and certainly not something to be taken as the only situation we’re discussing. When a computer is asleep, wake on LAN can wake it, and because the OS is still loaded, it doesn’t need to do a full boot before running any wake on LAN handling it has. If wake on LAN is disabled in the motherboard settings, then a computer in a deep sleep like S3 can’t respond to network activity at all.
Also, I’m not sure where you’ve got the idea that wake on LAN is mainly for fully powered off machines. There’s a reason it’s usually called wake on LAN, not power on by LAN. The ability for a network event to power on a machine from S5 power off is usually a separate setting and isn’t even possible on all hardware that supports wake on LAN.
I’m also not sure where you got the idea that only the hardware aspect counts as wake on LAN and the OS-side handling for being woken on LAN doesn’t count. Like with many things related to computers, it requires a hardware aspect and a software aspect working together to form a whole system, and in this case, it’s the whole system that’s called wake on LAN.
We’re in a thread that was started by someone complaining that their Windows machine kept waking up seemingly on its own when they put it to sleep, so how wake on LAN behaves for a computer that’s completely shut down was never particularly relevant, and certainly not something to be taken as the only situation we’re discussing. When a computer is asleep, wake on LAN can wake it, and because the OS is still loaded, it doesn’t need to do a full boot before running any wake on LAN handling it has. If wake on LAN is disabled in the motherboard settings, then a computer in a deep sleep like S3 can’t respond to network activity at all.
Also, I’m not sure where you’ve got the idea that wake on LAN is mainly for fully powered off machines. There’s a reason it’s usually called wake on LAN, not power on by LAN. The ability for a network event to power on a machine from S5 power off is usually a separate setting and isn’t even possible on all hardware that supports wake on LAN.
I’m also not sure where you got the idea that only the hardware aspect counts as wake on LAN and the OS-side handling for being woken on LAN doesn’t count. Like with many things related to computers, it requires a hardware aspect and a software aspect working together to form a whole system, and in this case, it’s the whole system that’s called wake on LAN.