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.
If you have a wireless Xbox controller it becomes far harder. Xone is what I want to use but then I have xow, xbdrvr and a bunch of other things to deal with. Or if I want to actually use my Nvidia video card to it's fullest ability, well good luck.
Linux is awesome but has a bit to go for me. Although it's been that was since it stopped being my daily driver in 2014.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Sleep keeps the system on but in a low power state. User and kernel sessions are kept in RAM. If power is lost, you start from a clean session. The system can resume full power with a key press or mouse movement.
Hibernate dumps the user and kernel session from RAM to disk and completely powers off. Upon startup, the hiberfil.sys file is read and put back into RAM. The physical power button must be pressed to turn on.
Hybrid Shutdown uses a feature called Fast Startup. The user session is discarded, while the kernel session is written to disk before the system completely powers off. Upon startup, the hiberfil.sys file is read and puts the kernel session back into RAM. The last logged on user has their profile preloaded, including any apps that support the feature. The physical power button must be pressed to turn on.
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.