IR constantly "sending"?

[anneortim]

I've never used the IR on my T30, never changed a setting, never paid any attention to it, nothing. Today I was playing with a home automation device that has an LED that flashes when it receives an IR signal. I noticed it was flashing for a second every 5 seconds or so. I thought that was interesting and wondered where an IR signal could possibly be coming from. I finally discovered, by covering up the IR on my T30, that it was coming from the laptop! I went into the device manager in Windows and disabled the IR and that did the trick. But I wonder what in the world is going on? Why would the IR be sending a signal all the time when I don't use it for anything and have never set it up to do anything? TIA

[rkawakami]

I believe that once you enable (or maybe it's enabled by default when the OS is installed) the IR port, it will poll every few seconds looking for any nearby device to connect to. Whenever I get my Palm Zire 71 in line of sight with most of my systems, Windows pops up that little bubble saying "Another computer is nearby". It's a quick and slow way of transferring small files back and forth .

If you have a video camera that has IR capability, you can see the flashes coming from the port. It is very noticeable even from 30' away.

[anneortim]

Well, that makes sense. I had no idea. But yeah, it must be enabled by default. Thanks

[RealBlackStuff]

There's also an IR setting in the BIOS, it's either disabled, enabled, or OS directed (can't remember the correct phrase).