I will be out of town for a week, and would like to be able to use the desktop.  Setting up remote access and wake-on-lan is easy enough.  The problem I have is that ISPs and search indexes ping my IP, maybe because I set up a DynDNS address for it.  Every time it is pinged, it wakes up.  Anybody know how I could make it so only I can actually wake the computer?

One way is to use wake on modem and make a phone call to wake it up, then access via the internet.  Another way is to set the system to sleep on idle, and rely on the lan activity to be low enough that its mostly asleep. If you connect via a router you may be able to filter out the ping activity so it never reaches your lan .

Would setting your router to reject Pings from the WAN still allow your remote access to work?

Here ye go....

http://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/ 

That should answer your questions. ;)

I thought the modem thing was a good idea, but then remembered I don't have a land line, just cell phone. lol.  Anyway, I disabled "Wake on Pattern Match," and that took care of the unwanted wake-ups.  But using "Wake on Pattern Match" only it doesn't always work.  In fact, the only consistency I can see about when it works and when it doesn't is that it works perfectly when I am right by the computer testing it, but never works when I actually need it to.  Hilarious, but not useful.  For what it is worth, when it decides not to work that is from a WOL program on my computer, web-based plugins, and also the app on my phone.  Oh well, I guess I can always use an old computer as an always-on gateway, remote desktop into it, then send the magic packet from there. 

Attached Link: What Is My IP

The only thing I can think of is that since you apparently have to open a port for remote WOL, you might be able to set up a rule in your firewall to only accept a connection on that port from address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. That might work, the big problem being you'ld have to know in advance what IP you'ld be coming in from. If you're using some kind of WOL web page service, maybe you could get that info.