Maximum PC

Greetings all,

Several years ago, I built an HTPC using a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-US2H motherboard with Windows 7 Ultimate 64. Later, I wanted to upgrade the network access to gigabit, so I replaced the mb's nic with an Intel PRO/1000 GT PCI adapter. The HTPC uses Windows Media Center for recording and viewing off the air TV, saving the recordings on a hard drive. Occasionally, I like to access the recordings on the HTPC using Media Center (also Win7 Ultimate 64) on a different PC in another room. This worked fine as long as the HTPC was up and running, but since it was sometimes asleep when I'm trying to use the other PC, I set up Wake on Lan to wake up the HTPC from the other PC, specifically using the magic packet method. This worked well with the PRO/1000 GT adapter, but I recently replaced it with an Intel EXPI9301CTBLK PCI Express card, which gave me a significant increase in speed versus the PRO/1000 GT. However, the Wake on Lan will no longer work, and, believe me, I've tried every possible combination of Intel configuration option, BIOS setting, Windows 7 power management setting, etc. I believe the bottom line is the Intel EXPI9301CTBLK is powering down whenever the HTPC is put to sleep, while the older PCI card wasn't. But I don't know how to get the PCI Express card to stay on. There is a bios setting for PME which is supposed to allow the computer to wake from the PCI and PCI Express bus, but this has been on from day one. Not sure what else to try, except upgrading the mb bios, but the newer bios version descriptions don't say anything about wol/PCI Express/power options. All responses appreciated - thanks in advance for any help.

Greetings all,

I am pleased to report I've solved this problem. Moving the network card from a PCIEx1 slot to a PCIEx16 slot caused it to start staying on when the computer is asleep, so the magic packet wake-up started working. I am now good to go and very thankful to have this working after several months of effort.