I've been more aware of the power my 3 pc's suck down. I recently retired one and set the other two to standby when I'm not using them. The only thing that proved to be a little bit of a nuisance was accessing the main pc from my laptop when it was sleeping. To get it to wake up remotely without some funky "magic packet" utility, i did the following:
In the properties for my network adapter (device manager), on the power management tab I checked "allow this device to bring the computer out of standby." Then on the advanced tab, my adapter had a power management selection called "on wake up & directed". From there I actually had nearly the opposite effect. After going in to standby, the pc would wake up less than 30 seconds later. It turns out my "server" upstairs was doing netbios requests to the pc's MAC address. Once I shut that pc down, standby worked normally.
From there all I needed to do was direct a network packet at my pc. Just doing a ping isn't enough since the adapter doesn't even know what an IP address is. Instead, I did a static arp entry:
arp -s 192.168.1.11 00-00-E9-60-A1-A8
After that a ping to .11 woke it right up.
B