Windows pc calling home (even while asleep)
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
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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.
Yeah, that sounds like ghosts.
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 was not in my case, the wakes happened when my router or HA controller scanned the network. Changing wake on magic packet (already had wake on lan disabled) remedied it for me.
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 think it's any device that scans for known devices so I'd imagine most routers
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.