Hi We started deploying 7 in our university, we have a simple script tool that sends pings to all our machines from time to time to try and determine wether they are functionning correctly or not (yes with a single/simple ping), we would like to be able to set the maximum power saving options and still be able to ping our machines. What would the best settings be like for this ? Fred

Assuming the exact set of requirements you're listing above ("still be able to ping our machines"), you would want to set your power plan settings for Put the computer to sleep: to Never. Powering down the display and disk drives should be fine, though. If you'd like the system motherboards to power-down (e.g., enter sleep or hibernation state) when inactive, you will not be able to use that single PING to both wake them and to have them respond. The system will have to remain powered-on for the ICMP PING packet to be processed by the network stack. As I recall (I don't currently use Wake-On-Lan) when the computer is powered-down, the packet that causes the computer to wake up is a specific "magic" Wake-On-Lan Ethernet packet. I suppose you could wake them all up then issue your PING. That would be a two-stage process, but it could net you some additional power savings. -Noel