I've always previously relied on emailing batches of users asking them to leave their PC's on one night for a preset configuration to fire off and patch up their PC's.

I'm sure you can imagine the percentage of people that actually remember!

Anyway, what I've done instead is go round to each PC and enable Wake on LAN so I can wake them up in the evenings and fire off a patch configuration, now, what I would like to do is set all this up to be done automatically so I've divided the company up into 5 different patch groups (we have just under 90 staff), 4 large groups and 1 'test' group with 4 users plus my own test machine.

Now the WOL works fine, its firing up the PC's successfully, however if I have the patch schedule set to go say, 15-30mins after, it gets stuck at scanning all night and never actually starts patching. 

Is this an issue caused by the computers not being logged in or something? When I try a patch schedule on my test rig when its plugged in, it works fine.

So I guess the question is two fold, firstly does anyone know why this fails when trying to run a patch schedule (that includes scanning which I don't seem to be able to disable) and secondly, am I doing this right or is there a better way to achieve these results? (that doesn't rely on users actually opening up outlook every once in a while.....!)

Thanks.