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.
A consequence of the endless need for NeW fEaTuReS
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.
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?
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.