Spooky

r2015

My wife gets up a few times during the night. Old age.


She said to me this morning before we got out of bed "you left the computer on in the spare bedroom, there were flashing lights."
Probably the monitor standby light.


"Did you turn it off?" I asked.


"No, too much bother" she said.


I went and had a look, nothing, no flashing lights anywhere, the computer was off. It needed a push of the power button to turn it on.


It is connected to one of these Eon power saver adapters that turns everything off when the computer is off.


So what was it doing when it thought no one was watching it?:eek:


And I had turned it off before I went to bed as I always check.

kwikbreaks

Wife imagined it?

On one middle of the night mission I thought there was an emergency vehicle outside until I realised that it was my new toothbrush which has a very bright led that flashes when it's on charge. Could even be the reverse that your wife spotted.

Sooler

r2015 wrote: »

My wife gets up a few times during the night. ... She said to me ... there were flashing lights.

Is she on the gin? :beer: :rudolf:

gjchester

r2015 wrote: »

So what was it doing when it thought no one was watching it?:eek:

Could it have been a router, or if the system has a wired connection the Link and Activity / Jabber lights on the Ethernet port. They may be small LED's but light up a room well when you eyes are used to the dark.

Strider590

r2015 wrote: »

It is connected to one of these Eon power saver adapters that turns everything off when the computer is off.

Sorry to pick on a point and go off on a tangent, but this is not a great idea and probably saving next to nothing.
PC power supplies are designed to be left in a standby state, they're very efficient and switching them off can cause issues, not least of which is the backup battery for the motherboard BIOS settings.

If your going to use power saving plugs, I suggest buying a power meter plug and checking what devices use what sort of power in standby, you may be wasting this device on something that doesn't really need it.

Plus, electrical devices produce 3 different forms of energy:
Light
Heat
Kinetic (movement)

In standby your PCs power supply doesn't produce any light (LEDs don't count) and it doesn't move, so the only way it can use energy is by producing small amounts of heat.

It's the middle of winter, your heating the house anyway, so all it's doing is supplementing the central heating by a relatively small amount, it's not wasting ANY electricity at all.
On the same principle, neither is overfilling your kettle (despite what the media likes to bring up every 12 months or so).

r2015

you may be wasting this device on something that doesn't really need it.

It leaves power to the computer, I charge my rechargeable batteries in the USB port.

It switches off the monitor, power to the speakers and power to the printer.

It was the monitor standby light flashing amber that she saw, this is normally off during the night.

This means that the computer had switched itself on and was still on sometime during the night and put the monitor in standby as it switches off after 10 minutes.

Is she on the gin?

Why do idiotic people assume because some one has to get up during the night to go to the toilet that they have been drinking.
I hope you pee the bed when you get old instead of getting up.

Sooler

I think the inference was she's getting up for sneaky swigs of the influence, hence seeing flashing lights

Kendall80

I'd go with the router explanation a few posts above.


Mine likes to have a good old flash even when nothing is on.

GunJack

wake on LAN active on the pc?

yummy_mummy_2

Could it be to do with windows updates? I have noticed that if updates are not installed at the time it will say your computer will restart in so many days to finish installing updates? I have always opted to install updates then rather than leave it for my computer to restart in so many days? How does it do that anyhow? So maybe it switched it's self on to do this.... Windows 8.1

Tropez

When you say the computer is "off" do you mean shutdown or in sleep mode?

There's a few things that can wake a computer in sleep mode, such as LAN activity (as mentioned above), some updates and in some cases the slightest movement of a mouse caused by a breeze, or just an odd position for the mouse where the laser (assuming it's a laser mouse) sends a signal that it has been moved (hanging it off the edge of a mouse mat can cause this).

I had an old Toshiba laptop that would turn itself on every day at 6am, even from a full shutdown. Turned out it was a bug in the BIOS and an update solved the problem.