Windows pc calling home (even while asleep)
I have a network-wide pi hole and I noticed that it requested activity.windows.com, a url blocked by my pi hole, even while my pc is suspended. I pinged 10.0.0.217 and it is currently unreachable. So, somehow, windows pc’s turn on networking, phones home, and turns off even while suspended.
Creepy behavior
Is this machine by any chance a recent laptop?
Newer laptops with Intel cpu (not sure about AMD) don't have a real sleep mode anymore. Instead, they have a mode where, besides the ram, the cpu and the network device are also kept alive for communication.
In theory, this means that when you wake up your device all of your apps and stuff will already be updated with the latest information from the web with little battery loss. In practice, it just overheats your laptop while in your backpack and kills the battery.
The ping you see while it is "sleeping" might be from this.
It's such a dumb fucking feature too.
"Oh god forbid my email client and messaging app refresh 5 seconds after I wake my laptop instead of being already refreshed"
Who actually cares? Who on earth asked for this zombie sleep state?
Nobody asked for it. And it's not like they add anything people ask for (or remove things people ask them to get rid of) anyway.
Macbooks are the same way. I have one of my System Bots running on my work laptop (now that I can get away with it) and it wakes up... let me see... somewhere between every half hour to three hours, whether I want it to or not.
This "always on" bullshit is frustrating.
Don't forget the added feature of your laptop overheating and crashing when you put it into your backpack.
Or my personal favorite is when it doesn't overheat and crash it drains 20% of it's battery in 15 minutes then goes into hibernation.
I think the worst part is not that they added it, but that they removed regular S3.
Your phone does the same thing and it's definitely a good thing.
A consequence of the endless need for NeW fEaTuReS
I expect is more usefull for big files or similar, aka like the consoles standby updates downloads.
Linus explored that bug, it's not so much with recent laptops as it is with Windows sleep in general. For some god forsaken reason, if your laptop is connected to a network while plugged in and you put it to sleep, and then unplug your laptop from the power, it will burn through its battery and die. This doesn't happen if you unplug your laptop before you put it into sleep mode. My guess is that while it's plugged in, Windows thinks it's fine for it to run a bit hotter, but when you unplug it while it's in sleep mode, it doesn't realise it's not plugged in anymore and drains the battery. Idk how they have still not fixed this after many years, but it is still a problem.
Here's Microsoft's information page on it:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/modern-standby
As the time goes I just miss my old laptop more and more. What's next, no shutdown feature?
Pretty soon, yeah. Try making sure a recent Macbook is actually offline.
Same for most AMD laptops as well.
You have precisely described my experience with my latest laptop. I get probably 4 hours of battery life in this mode. After that my battery is probably at 20% or less which means that when I open the laptop there's almost nothing I can do with it.
I had to figure out how to re-enable S3 sleep and now I'm struggling with my stupid Wi-Fi adapter which breaks every time I resume from sleep but all I have to do is toggle it and I'm back to running again. After doing this change my battery life in sleep will actually last at least a day now which is massive compared to what it used to be.
Hibernate FTW
This is why I disconnect my machines from the network while in sleep mode (I use only wired connections). For me it’s perfectly sufficient if they update the apps while I use them.
How dare you not allow Microsoft use their PC
thanks for the input Nabeg
Thanks for the nick lol, took me a second :D
Sleep is no longer what it used to be. They killed off S3 sleep in favor of some always connected mode, much like you cell phone.
Which has its pros and cons, but that still doesn't mean it should invade your privacy.
I only learned this during the pandemic when i started working from home and my work laptop would wake up at 1am, fans blasting 100%
Or my laptop would wake up in my backpack during my commute and drain the whole battery...
I opened a helpdesk ticket and they didnt know why. Their solution was "just turn off your laptop"....
After doing my owm digging, i realized S3 was gone and windows just does whatever the fuck it wants
that's only newer hardware that meets specific requirements.
It got disabled one day on my 8th Gen i7 XPS. It was driving me crazy trying to figure out why it keep cooking it self alive in my backpack. It's since been demoted to house use, sleep is still useless even after many FW updates and fresh os install. That thing used to last weeks on battery just closing the lid. Now it can't make it though the night. I wish I could turn it back on in this case, my new laptop is much better about it.
Oh god another one of these posts...
When pihole blocks a dns request, devices often keep trying to connect until the connection is successful. So yea, no shit it's ginna keep trying to query that domain repeatedly, including when you're sleeping.
The thing is, the device was in suspend for a couple days now.
So, let me grasp your comment, are you saying that this is not creepy at all?
EDIT: To clarify, I find both things creepy, the telemetry and the insistence to ping home no matter what.
The fact that windows has so much telemetry is creepy yes. The fact that it will keep trying to ping the domain when blocked is not creepy and is basic tech functionality.
are you saying that this is not creepy at all?
Definitely creepy that it phones home in the first place.
But it's not necessarily creepy that it keeps trying; it could just be sloppy programming. Hanlon's Razor comes to mind. Microsoft Teams behaved in a similar way apparently. If you blocked it phoning home at the network level it would buffer gigabytes of data on disk until the disk was full.
My Windows 10 machine comes up from sleep when nobody is anywhere near it. Seems weird to me. Also sometimes I wake it, sign in and the folder Music>Pictures (the regular Pictures folder… for some reason that’s where it is) is open in explorer. Couldn’t figure out whether it’s malware or Microsoft.
Go to your NIC's properties and scroll down to disable WAKE ON MAGIC PACKETS.
If you have any device that scans for your MAC (probably your router) it will wake up. Drove me crazy until I figured it out
It's most likely modern standby (S0 standby) and not a WOL packet.
All modern laptops default to this, and the latest don't even give you an option to turn it off.
It probably is that, makes sense. Not sure what devices would be doing it... (Xfinity router?). I even moved to a new house with different devices, router etc and it still did that.
Yeah, that sounds like ghosts.
I had something similar a while back, where it was waking up from sleep for no reason. I can't remember the exact reason, but it had to do with a hardware being allowed to wake the device. I disabled it from being able to wake the machine and haven't had a problem again. You can use the cmd to find which device woke your pc.
You're right, it could be a setting in Windows or perhaps the BIOS. I know there is often a 'wake on LAN' BIOS setting...
the folder Music>Pictures (the regular Pictures folder… for some reason that’s where it is) is open in explorer.
This sounds like the kind of thing that might happen if you have some kind of automatic sync set up, like when you plug your phone in and it automatically copies photos, or perhaps a cloud service that's syncing photos?
My phone is never plugged into my computer and I don’t have any service like that running that I know of.
It could be OneDrive (though I don't use it at all) or even the ghost of the Explorer iCloud plugin.
Come on man, he probably just misses his mom.
smug Linux noises
Yeah so smug...it only stops accepting input from my touchpad if i close the lid on my laptop which puts it in sleep mode.
switch to enterprise if you havent already. enterprise is the only version from "0" data collection mode in Group Policy.
use this for activation: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
How trustable is this script?
its the most recommended one on r/piracy and FMHY.
Here's another one, its created by a mydigitallife forum member https://github.com/abbodi1406/KMS_VL_ALL_AIO
Check the code yourself
Windows... With this only word you already have all the abswers
Yeah. It's amazing how my windows laptop, whilst sleeping, whirrs all its fans up on the middle of the night. I am not suggesting that is it sending out telemetry, but it is fucking infuriating for sleep to mean anything other than "stop doing anything until I tell you to wake up".
That is because recent laptops don't "sleep" like before with s4 (hybernate) or other sx.
They have some sort of tucking clock waiting for windows to wake up to check for updates.
In theory it allows to keep everything up to date while people are not working.
However un proactice, it drains battery and overheats laptops, because Microsoft implemented that feature like crap, or the partners did some stupid things.
It was supposed to only activate when the laptop was plugged in. However if the laptop was plugged in, put on sleep, then unplugged, windows still believed that the laptop was plugged in.
Now I don't know if windows ever solved that issue after people brought it up and Linus from Linus tech tips complained to Microsoft.
Thanks pihole!
(Also, hibernate > sleep imo )
Shutdown is hybrid sleep anyway. Best of both worlds.
Also FYI you have to restart to properly shut down Windows now. If you shut down and then turn it back on it will just resume from S4 hybrid sleep. Shut down does not normally shut down, it enters a zero power sleep state. Restart actually shuts down and reboots the OS.
I think hybernation is really meant for when you want near zero power but a little trickle for something specific to wake the PC, eg an external device or network port. You can also sometimes do this directly in BIOS, if it has the facility.
You're a bit confused.
You can disable Fast Startup or simply hold SHIFT and click Shutdown. The feature requires the user to press the Shutdown button within Windows for it to function. If you press the physical power button on your case, that is an ACPI initiated shutdown and bypasses the Fast Startup feature. This is by design.
Your motherboard firmware controls whether or not the USB ports will continue to supply power when the system is off. It's essentially like a wall brick at this point.
Fast Startup was really meant for HDD. With SSD it's not really necessary. It's negligible time savings and with how buggy drivers can be, days or weeks old kernel sessions are bound to start causing problems.
Ain't 10.0.0.217 an private IP?
Yes that is the local ip of the pc phoning home
Yah. That make sense now. I thought that's what the domain resolved to.
Never used PiHole but Blocky.
Probably the IP of the device, not the IP resolved through DNS
yes, it's for LANs
did you expect it to be a public ip?
Astral projecting
He pinged the local IP to check if the network card was up on his suspended machine...
Honestly if you're still trying to find workaround for Microsofts crap at this point - just switch to Linux.
Oh, my daily driver is a linux, i just have a spare surface book 3 i use occasionally for gaming (the thing is surprisingly powerful)
Idk how well linux would support detaching and touchscreen with pen. But I’ll definitely switch the os to linux sometime in the future when i get a new gaming rig.
I am using linux-surface on my surface book 2, works perfectly. BUT the webcam doesn't work :-)
I have a convertible laptop with pen and it works fine.
In trying it doing that on someone hybrid, not surface but a Lenovo, PopOS! seems to works mostly out-of-box.