this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
29 points (77.4% liked)

Privacy

31975 readers
411 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Greetings! So recently, i spent a few hours coding software. After i was done and i shut off my pc, i noticed both of the ethernet lights were on and blinking. Does this mean that Microsoft is sending data to their servers before the PC fully shuts off? I am scared that this might be the thing it does. How can i get rid of this issue? I have no idea if it's related to Windows or the PC itself.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Does your PC support Wake-On-Lan? Effectively, leaving the port powered to allow switching on over the network

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

It does, but wake on lan is disabled in the BIOS.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Windows by default doesn't fully power off when you tell it to shut down. It goes into hibernation and keeps the network open for updates and will sometimes power back on to complete these updates.

If you want to fully power off, hold the left shift key when you click shut down. Or turn the power off elsewhere (eg. psu or power bar.) I'm sure there's another way to do it, or to prevent the behavior entirely.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This isn't correct at all. You are confusing fast boot and sleep. When Windows goes to sleep (I think it is S4) is when it can come back up for updates. However, during sleep networking is not active. It just wakes back up on a timer. Fast boot isn't sleep at all. It just a fancy shutdown mode that doesn't unmount the boot disk before shutdown. It also caches the system state to improve the startup time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Fast boot is just Windows logging you out of your session, then hibernating.

Sleep is keeping the computer in a low-power state with RAM powered on..

Both of these have been known to result in laptops powering on unbeknownst to their owners to perform updates and remain powered on afterward.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Windows is never responsible for this. It is errors in the EC code or BIOS wake timers. When you click shutdown, the system is powered off. Windows hands off execution to Bios code for shutdown after the cycling dots saying "shutdown".

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)