Re: Do laptops now consume power in hibernate mode in Vista?

On 03/05/2009 04:04, Big John wrote:

If there is some way to prevent this I'd be happy to hear it, but so far I haven't found any solution other than remembering to turn the computer "off" (don't leave it in hibernation for long periods when it is withing "range" of my router!!) or turn off the "automatic update".

From your description this sounds like a wireless setup. I've only ever seen this with wired LANs but there's no reason it shouldn't work the same way.

As someone else pointed out what's probably waking up the machine is the Wake-On-LAN (WOL) function built into the BIOS, which allows a sleeping or hibernating machine to be awakened by traffic detected on the network card. If you never ever intend to use this feature, the best way of disabling it is to go into the BIOS, look for a WOL option, and disable it.

If you do want to use the WOL feature, or for some reason it's not adjustable from the BIOS, it's possible to control exactly what type of traffic will wake the machine from within the OS. By default many cards will turn on if they detect any network traffic that MAY be for their machine, which on a busy LAN can be quite frequent. Alternatively they can be told to only respond to a so-called Magic Packet which has the MAC address of the card encoded within it. So only a deliberately sent packet from another machine on the LAN (or some high-end routers) can wake it.

In Windows these options are found on the Power Management property *** for each network card within the Device Manager. The options are "Allow this device to wake the computer" (you want this checked unless you really never want to make use of the feature) and "Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer" (disabling this one should prevent random de-hibernation but still allow you to use WOL at some future point if you wish).

Other operating systems should have similar settings buried somewhere within the network configuration options.

--
Kev
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