Mystery Solved...kinda

[sinanju]

So snippy, Twoson and I just got back from watching Revenge of the Sith (review to follow).  When we got home, Twoson disappeared into the front bedroom where he's staying for a few weeks for his summer visit.  He brought his computer from home so that he could play his games and chat with friends via some instant-messaging program.  His PC is plugged into the router which connects my computer and Snippy's computer to our cablemodem.

I was just walking past my computer (which is in a corner of the dining room) when I saw and heard it boot up without anyone touching it.  Yes, I finally caught it doing that weird thing it does.  I remembered that Twoson had just gone into his room to play a computer game.  So I asked him if he'd just turned his computer on.  Yes, says he.  Well, to be specific, he woke it up--it was powered up but dormant.

So, apparently, starting or waking Twoson's computer causes mine to boot up as well.  I'm not sure why, and I'm pretty sure that shouldn't happen, but at least now I know what's going on, if not why.  It also turns out that Snippy often gets an error message when she tries to boot her PC or at random times when it's already on.  It reports something to the effect that Windows had detected a hardware conflict having to do with an IP address.  If you click thru the error message (which takes a few tries sometimes), then she can still access the cablemodem with no problems.  I suspect that this is also related to plugging Twoson's computer into the router, though I don't know why.  Snippy and I have had no such problems with our two computers interfering with one another this way.

Still, both problems should go away when Twoson takes his computer home, and neither is more than an annoyance.

Comments

[aquamarcia.livejournal.com]

My semi-educated guess tells me this is a combination of the wake-on-LAN issue mentioned by someone else in comment to your earlier post about this, and your router doing a poor job of assigning unique IP addresses to every computer. If the error seems specifically related to Twoson's computer, it may need to be reconfigured to get along better with your home network.