Remotely waking a sleeping computer - Windows 7

[professorman]

I randomly have the need to grab a file from my home computer while I am at work. My desktop PC at home, I normally leave it turned on, and gone to sleep, or hibernated with rare shutdowns.

For a long time, I just left it running 24/7 so that I could use remote desktop to connect to it, however, I do not feel good about leaving it turned on 24/7. I prefer for it to be either sleeping or hibernating.

Is there any way that I can remotely wake up my PC when I need it? I know I have seen functions in the bios to remotely wake a PC, however, i have never investigated how to do something like that.

I am running Windows 7 x64 on a SSD.
I have a Asus P6TSE Motherboard.
I have a TP-Link N750 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router (TL-WDR4300).

Does anyone here have a method to remotely wake the PC?

 

[Zaap]

Wake On LAN is what you should look into.

There's a fairly decent LifeHacker article about it here:
http://lifehacker.com/348197/access-your-computer-anytime-and-save-energy-with-wake+on+lan

It's been my experience that some hardware is difficult to make work reliably with WOL, whereas others work perfectly every time. I'm not really network knowledgeable enough to know what the real technical differences are. Currently, I've got all my systems I need to remotely start and access working fine with WOL, but I've also had machines in the past that just wouldn't respond to remote WOL commands no matter what I was doing to set them up for it. (And yes, I'm sure it was just my lack of really knowing what I was doing that was probably the culprit)

The nice thing for you, I'm fairly sure your TP-Link router is a good candidate for alternative firmware like DD-WRT that greatly simplifies sending WOL command remotely.