Windows 7: Networking question....

I don't think this is particularly a big problem but it's kinda odd behavior...

I'm on Windows 7 X86 build 7600 Ultimate and every time I open a shared folder it wakes up all the computers on my network...



Question: Is this normal Windows 7 behavior?

If the other PCs all have the wake on LAN setting enabled then yes it is.

Oli

Ok... 'cause that never happened under XP.... So, no worries then...

When I open, for example, my local Downloads folder my entire network is waking up and it took me a while to figure out it was happening whenever I opened a shared folder... even locally.

I wonder if there's a way to stop it from doing that....

I think this tells you how to disable Wake on LAN just be careful you don't disable anything else though.
Fix for Windows 7 "random wake from sleep" problem Jack Ukleja

Oli

Thank you for the link... However, I don't want to disable wake on lan, on any of these machines. They need to wake up when someone accesses them... The thing is, these machines are all over the house, my son's bedroom, our bedroom etc. I don't want them going off in the middle of the night because I opened the downloads folder on my local hard disk... It's a bit screwey... I open a folder that's on my local machine and every machine in the house spins up... There's no need of that. Even ignoring the wasted energy, it's extremely annoying when you're trying to catch 40 winks...

I know this will sound obvious but couldn't you just turn all your PCs off at night when they're not being used?

Save some money... I mean the planet.

Oli

Yes and no... The problem is they are seldom "not being used". The kiddies can turn theirs off if they aren't downloading anything... but the HTPC is on 24/7 because it's also the primary download machine... The ones in our bedrooms are also media machines and quite often we will catch a late show and let it fall asleep as we do... The family's gotten kinda used to being able to access these machines whenever the mood strikes.

The Windows 7 machines are the only ones that do this. The XP and Linux machines will only wake another machine when you click on one of their shares and it only wakes the one machine... local access doesn't affect the rest of the network.

Ok... experimenting with this further...

If I open an unshared folder on my desktop machine... nothing.
If I open a shared folder locally on my desktop machine... every computer in the house wakes up.
If I open a folder that contains a shared folder... every computer in the house wakes up.

This is beyond weird....

Already tried...

Disable link level topology in network adaptor.... same thing
Disable wake on pattern in other computers.... same thing
Disable network discovery... now I can't see the other machines

Any suggestions would be welcomed...

Maybe this is the same problem I am/was having...machines are fully powered off (by power outlet switch) when not used currently.

My kids machine would turn on for no reason and I could not figure it out. It seemed random. I will have to do some testing and see if the same thing is happening here.

It sounds like your network computers are waking whenever a network disk is accessed. You should look for an option that disables wake computer on network/disk access.

Resources:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941145