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

[Jack Jackson <jack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.