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?
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.
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.
Your phone does the same thing and it’s definitely a good thing.
I expect is more usefull for big files or similar, aka like the consoles standby updates downloads.
A consequence of the endless need for NeW fEaTuReS
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?
That’s one of the ideas with MRAM: buy your device already booted up, no more booting up or shutting down (…or reinstalling, or changing the OS).
Same for most AMD laptops as well.
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.