this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 187 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Honestly if you're still trying to find workaround for Microsofts crap at this point - just switch to Linux.

[–] [email protected] 190 points 1 year ago (3 children)

At this point for me, trying to get games working on Linux has become easier than trying to get telemetry to stop working on Windows.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (4 children)

And since Ive never bought the problematic games before it's so much easier for me.

I'd encourage anyone to ditch the crappy anticheat broken crap and just go back to playing good high quality games.

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[–] theangryseal 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I game on Linux every day.

I wish multiplayer worked across the board but it’s whatever. I don’t have time for it any way haha.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am using linux-surface on my surface book 2, works perfectly. BUT the webcam doesn't work :-)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I have a convertible laptop with pen and it works fine.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In trying it doing that on someone hybrid, not surface but a Lenovo, PopOS! seems to works mostly out-of-box.

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[–] [email protected] 129 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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?

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I think the worst part is not that they added it, but that they removed regular S3.

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[–] Redex68 31 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

As the time goes I just miss my old laptop more and more. What's next, no shutdown feature?

[–] Dreadful6644 6 points 1 year ago

Same for most AMD laptops as well.

[–] glarf 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] NabeGewell 72 points 1 year ago (3 children)

How dare you not allow Microsoft use their PC

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Which has its pros and cons, but that still doesn't mean it should invade your privacy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The thing is, the device was in suspend for a couple days now.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Modern sleep modes are internet connected, with the intent to allow systems to perform updates while sleeping.

I don't like it but that's how it's designed to work.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

aka S0 sleep/Modern Standby.
It has some legitimate benefits like returning from sleep immediately. Kinda want it on linux but without all the telemetry crap (but it's really, really hard to pull of at an OS level)

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] glimse 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

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[–] TheTetrapod 20 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that sounds like ghosts.

[–] Dawn 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Come on man, he probably just misses his mom.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] Syrup 16 points 1 year ago

Windows... With this only word you already have all the abswers

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago
[–] DacoTaco 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks pihole!

(Also, hibernate > sleep imo )

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] icedterminal 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're a bit confused.

  • 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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Ain't 10.0.0.217 an private IP?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes that is the local ip of the pc phoning home

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[–] jcg 5 points 1 year ago

Probably the IP of the device, not the IP resolved through DNS

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