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
Honestly if you’re still trying to find workaround for Microsofts crap at this point - just switch to Linux.
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.
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.
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.
What multiplayer doesn’t work? Do you mean because of EAC not working or something?
Sorry for the rant but why the hell people still entertain themselves with proprietary Windows games in 2023?!? So much so that they are willing to put up with such utter rubbish of an OS? Man, just play better games, even FOSS ones, on Linux! The proprietary rubbish pay-to-win games should be shunned!
You can’t play VR on linux without significant pain and most VR games are from small devs who don’t do unethical stuff like pay-to-win.
If you have a wireless Xbox controller it becomes far harder. Xone is what I want to use but then I have xow, xbdrvr and a bunch of other things to deal with. Or if I want to actually use my Nvidia video card to it’s fullest ability, well good luck.
Linux is awesome but has a bit to go for me. Although it’s been that was since it stopped being my daily driver in 2014.
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.
I am using linux-surface on my surface book 2, works perfectly. BUT the webcam doesn’t work :-)
In trying it doing that on someone hybrid, not surface but a Lenovo, PopOS! seems to works mostly out-of-box.
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?
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.
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?
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.
How dare you not allow Microsoft use their PC
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.
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
It got disabled one day on my 8th Gen i7 XPS. It was driving me crazy trying to figure out why it keep cooking it self alive in my backpack. It’s since been demoted to house use, sleep is still useless even after many FW updates and fresh os install. That thing used to last weeks on battery just closing the lid. Now it can’t make it though the night. I wish I could turn it back on in this case, my new laptop is much better about it.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
