Richard Fangnail <> wrote:
>When you are using the Internet with Windows, does Windows
>continuously send/receive something just so that it knows it's still
>connected okay?
>In other words, if I am doing nothing with the computer, Windows will
>know if it suddenly loses the connection. How exactly did it know?
I don't know for certain, but I think that this is what happens: the
networking hardware - the Ethernet or wireless hardware - knows when
it's receiving a signal from its port, and when there's nothing there.
It sends an interrupt to the CPU when this status changes, and the
interrupt handler reports the status change to you.
What I wonder about is the little globe on the networking icon in the
System Tray. The system figures out that it's on a network and
displays the networking icon, that's fine. But then it somehow figures
out that it's connected not just to a LAN but to the Internet and the
little globe appears on the icon. How does it know that? Surely
there's no difference in the signal being received by the Ethernet or
wireless hardware? Does it ping Microsoft?
--
Tim Slattery
MS MVP(Shell/User)
http://members.cox.net/slatteryt
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