My laptop recently started turning itself on (it is usually completely off, i.e. Shut down). Recently I woke up because of it (the CD drive always makes a noise when switching on). When I got home today, it was on. Nobody else was on it.
Do you think it could be a hacker or a virus? Perhaps a hacker is using someone else's computer to operate a botnet that mines cryptocurrencies when the computer is not in use (if the owner noticed that someone else had access to the PC, he could simply cut the power supply). My laptop isn't powerful enough to mine effectively with it, but it certainly works fine with a network.
On the other hand, my laptop fell off a month or two ago. Now the screen can no longer be folded so well. However, it would be strange if the problems and glitches only started to appear now. What do you think about that?
Go into the BIOS and reset the BIOS settings to the factory settings.
What happens then? Can this damage or delete data?
Nothing is deleted there. Only the BIOS settings are set as if it had come straight from the factory.
The best thing to do is to look in the BIOS to see whether there are any power-on settings or wake-ons activated.
Wake on LAN through the network cable would also be possible
I think that the laptop did not shut down properly but went into sleep mode (save energy). - It's not stable.
My PC also starts up by itself from sleep mode.
I can only imagine that the operating system behaves somewhat unauthorized. Thanks to uefi and co, bios and operating systems are merging more and more. And I could imagine windows saying: the user does not update, so let's do that and just turn the computer on at night if necessary.
