Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] WinXPHome is active despite hybernate?

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Jack Jackson <jack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 15:04:24 -0700
At 02:13 PM 5/27/2004, Peter Marquardt wrote:
Several times I've seen one of the Windows XP Home boxes in my home network "connected" and "active" in the LAN. The light on the NIC and the switch are _on_ like if the machine was not turned off at all. Today I concentrated on that machine with Ethereal and found it to send ARP requests and announce its NetBios name/workgroup. It is the only desktop PC with Windows XP Home, the Notebook when booted into XP Home and hibernating doesn't show that behavior and even my running and online Linux / BSD boxen are less "noisy" on the LAN when idle than the hibernating XP Home box. It's perfectly quiet though, when Windows is actually shut down.

Is that normal? I always thought hibernation is a suspend to disk followed by a power-off. (The machine also boots and recovers from HD upon power-on) If the OS isn't managing the NIC, who/what then?

Generally when hibernated all power should be removed from the entire machine including the NIC. However, some NIC cards have a 'wake on LAN' feature'. I don't know too much about it, but I think the idea is that the NIC does still have power when the CPU is shut down and has the ability to wake-up the CPU. I would think that would apply only to Suspend and not Hibernate. It might be possible to turn that off by looking at the properties of the NIC.

Since you say that the light on the NIC is on, that shows that the NIC does have power.