Windows PCs can't sleep properly, and Microsoft wants it that way
The Modern Standby feature in newer Windows PCs never seems to work right.
The gist:
The always-on nature of phones and tablets is incredibly convenient. Wouldn’t it be great if your (non-ARM) laptop or desktop could do this too? Save power when you’re not using it, but still be ready at a moment’s notice?
Microsoft certainly thought so, which is why when Windows 8 was released, it introduced a new feature called Connected Standby. If the hardware indicated support (foreshadowing), instead of telling the BIOS to enter system standby, Windows would enter Connected Standby.
I first ran into the wonders of Modern Standby on my Dell Inspiron 5482, an 8th generation Intel 2-in-1 laptop with a spinning hard drive. After a few months of owning it, I started noticing that it wasn’t sleeping properly. If I closed it, I could still sometimes hear the fans running even 15 minutes later. If I put it in my backpack, there was a good chance I’d take it out at 0% battery or to the fans running at full blast and the CPU dangerously close to overheating. Half the time the hard drive wouldn’t even spin down, which sure is nice when you’re planning to be jostling it around in a bag for a couple hours.
The worst part of this all was that Dell gave you no official way to disable Modern Standby. Windows itself isn’t any help, either. If the BIOS says it supports Modern Standby, Windows takes it at its word and completely disables the ability to enter S3 sleep (classic standby). There’s no official or documented option for disabling Modern Standby through Windows, which is incredibly annoying.
Another issue with Modern Standby is what can trigger wakeup events, and for how long. Supposedly, only certain built-in Windows functions, like updates and telemetry can actually wake the device up, but so can apps installed through the Microsoft Store.
Microsoft probably deserves most of the blame for this mess. It created the feature and has been (allegedly) pressuring vendors to implement it and discontinue support for S3 sleep.
Was running into the same previously. Putting my desktop to sleep only to find it waking up in the middle of the night, and for some reason not going back to sleep afterwards. I believe the solution for me previously was disabling wake timers. Hasn't been an issue since. However this is a much larger issue on things like laptops where preventing sleep while in a backpack could lead to excessive heat generation. Infuriating that it's forced by default
And don't sleep or close the lid with power connected. It won't realise it's on battery once it's asleep. Hence battery drain.
Mine also did that, but with the added 'benefit' of forgetting how to turn on my graphics card when it did had to wake up at some point without my input.
Fun times...
Here I was blaming the cat for using my computer at night
Desktops typically don't support modern/connected/s0 standby. Wake timers is something different designed to wake a machine up from classic S3 sleep.
That's different: probably due to Windows Update, but there are other things that can set wake timers to do various things at night. For some genius reason they never go back to sleep.
Half the time the hard drive wouldn’t even spin down, which sure is nice when you’re planning to be jostling it around in a bag for a couple hours.
I'm pretty sure this is what trashed my first laptop. Thankfully I didn't have a lot of information on there yet and was able to replace the hard drive. But absolutely ridiculous that this passed quality control.
They laid off quality control.
Is that different from ... the thing you have to disable in Windows, before you can access the NTFS partition in Linux?
I just shut everything down.
I can't think of a scenario where I need a PC/laptop in less than 10-20 seconds.
Phone? Sure, if I want to take a quick photo or something, but a PC? Where's the hurry?
Mostly for not loosing unsavable work across transit. Though, Windows has kinda blurred the line between shutdown and standby, so now you can do neither (I guess you can still shutdown properly holding down the shift key while pressing the button, but who thinks about that?).
But standby was indeed much more prevelant when booting your laptop took 2~5min.
I don't want to shut my PC down just to walk a few blocks down the road to get lunch.
S3 standby my machine takes 10 seconds to wake up, S0 standby my machine takes 5 seconds to wake up, but to fully boot up from off and reload everything to where I was will take minutes and destroy my poor battery. i9 and nvme ssds are not power friendly.
I use my computer as my main communication device. When I wake it up, I want all my apps refreshed and ready, texts and mail downloaded, and everything ready to go. Then again, that’s why I have a Mac 😂 works great
The always-on nature of phones and tablets is incredibly convenient. Wouldn’t it be great if your (non-ARM) laptop or desktop could do this too?
No, it would not.
My laptop is not a phone. I do not want it to notify me about things when it's inactive. All I want from suspend to RAM is for it to quickly[0] return to its previous state[1].
[0] Compared to suspend to disk, even with an SSD
[1] This isn't an excuse not to save work before suspending
Well, I can see useful use-cases. I mean, laptops are often used disconnected right? So if a laptop sitting in a bag can wake up, sync all your emails and do all your patches while it's in your house and internet-connected, that means it's ready to go when you're using it at the doctor's office where he's got no wifi and you don't want to turn on pairing on your phone because every time you do that it somehow blows through all your data.
Obviously the trade-off failed miserably. I'd much rather have a full-battery laptop then a laptop that tried to sync everything 2 days ago then ran down the batteries. But it should've been able to work in theory.
All of which would be fine for people who want this, but the issue is there is no option on many computers. For users who don't want this functionality, who don't enjoy their computer doing shit in the background when not using it, there is no option to disable it fully. It's either shit it down or accept this crap as a consequence of sleeping it.
Also, when laptops are in bags, ventilation isn't very good. I'd rather it not be trying to do anything in there, at all, whatsoever, except staying asleep.
But more to the point
So if a laptop sitting in a bag can wake up, sync all your emails and do all your patches while it's in your house and internet-connected
Another way to frame this is "what if Microsoft could do shit at literally any time and the only way to stop them is to shut down fully or get out of range of any any known wifi network".
Almost no modern sleep modes are able to work with Linux properly either, and BIOS support for S3 sleep mode is slowly being removed by certain larger manufacturers. Very crappy.
Linux supports s2idle/s0ix just fine, though I guess it will depend on hardware like suspend always has done. I have a laptop which only supports s2idle and it almost always works fine. (There are issues in Windows too though).
However, it is still very crappy, because there was never anything wrong with S3. It comes up in a second, and the battery discharge rate is low enough to leave it suspended for days without worrying. The latter feature is actually important - coming in 0.1 seconds as opposed to 1 is not important.
Seconded. I s2idle my ThinkPad Z13 (running Fedora Bazzite) multiple times a day, every day, and have zero issues. It sleeps well with very little drain (I actually leave it in this state overnight), resume is instant, and it works perfectly.
Get a system that's been designed with Linux in mind (and a sensible distro), and there should be no issues with sleep, @just_another_person@lemmy.world
I just shutdown now and I'm running Linux Mint on older Lenovos with S3. I tried to add old S3 sleep manually in Mint but it never quite worked right and at times the laptop actually froze instead of sleeping with the CPU on and the fans running.
I just go to shutdown instead. It's annoying as the idea of instant resume when opening the laptop would be great but I also don't wanted a cooked CPU with a dead battery.
Try to put my PC to sleep? 1 of 3 things happens: it either goes to sleep normally, it goes to sleep but wakes itself up 2 seconds later, or the PC actually just shuts down. Try to shut down my PC? 1 of 2 things happens: it either shuts down, or it restarts.
I think the problem is Windows.
The only way for me to keep my desktop off all night is for me to switch off the power supply or unplug it, sleep, hibernate, flat out turning it off, all result in a bright ass screen waking me up at 2am
You can go into the window settings until it to shut down all the way. My computer used to do that too, until I disabled the setting.
There was a video from LTT not too long ago where they contacted MS about the issue. It's supposedly due to device manufacturers not implementing the spec properly so they ended up giving up on it.
Is not just me!
It's because one of your peripherals is set to wake state.
I turned my mouse and keyboard off from this.
Now I manually have to touch my power button to wake.
Turned your mouse and keyboard off?
Turned your wake state checker to not check for keyboard and mouse?
What does "from this" mean? Curious how this works
I dunno why I individually responded to people when I should've just done this.
It's because one of your peripherals is set to wake state. You can google how to figure that out.
I turned my mouse and keyboard off from this. The mouse will wake it even if you move it. So f that. Keyboard. Some. Keyboards will wake just by having an active transmission (so manually turn it off every time - no thanks)
Now I manually have to touch my power button to wake.
This is an issue, but it’s not the issue. The issue is windows modern standby, trying to make users PCs always on like smartphones. Except the processors don’t support the same low power states as smartphones processors, and can be triggered by software like windows update to turn on even when disconnected from power and without functioning ventilation.
My macbook wakes up whenever I get up in the middle of the night to pee. This is without me touching the mouse or the keyboard or even the desk they're sitting on. This bothers me.
MacBook: "Oh, hey chickenlady... I see your up. Yeah, I couldn't sleep either. Why don't you come over here and spend some time in my soft white glow. We can just surf the web and consume for hours."
Well that's a separate issue. You have some Apple feature turned on and it needs turned off.
It's because one of your peripherals is set to wake state. You can google how to figure that out.
Sometimes that's a firmware issue. ASUS screwed up the ACPI DSDT for my 2021 G15 by leaving the sleep capabilities off of one of the NVMe slots - every time you'd tell the machine to sleep it would try, but because one of the NVMe slots wasn't capable the machine would then immediately rewake. I had to decompile the damned thing, patch it and load my patched table as an in memory override every single boot.
Well that's impressive AF.
Hahaha that's king to angrily fix it yourself
This is true for S3 sleep, but that's not the issue here. S0 sleep or Modern Standby just doesn't put the computer to sleep. Windows manages device power states instead of the BIOS, and it usually doesn't work out so well.
Overheating and battery drain caused by Modern Standby happen on laptops that are closed with nothing plugged in.
The "allow device to wake up computer" is already set to "off" in mouse, keyboard and other USB devices, together with any bios settings related to wake up. Yet still, at least once a week my computer is on in the morning, after i set it to Hibernate the night before. Sometimes it even power cycles straight away after i tried to turn it of. Same today, when i was was out of the house for a few hours, and it decided to magically turn itself on, run windows update and restart. I have to power it down and turn of the the power on the power-strip each night. My work laptop has the same issue, except it does not care about the power strip switch and discharges the battery overnight instead!
Yeah just what I want from my PC: for it to be more like the always-on, nagging attention removed that is my phone. /s
This is why I always shut down and never sleep it. With my nvme drive boot up is seconds.
I dont even bother anymore. I just shutdown. Need me on my computer in 1 minute? Sorry.
With m.2s around it takes less than a minute to go from the start button to the desktop. Haven't put my pc to sleep since upgrading to that
I wish. Work issued me a previous gen zbook (well, it was over one year ago), and it takes forever before Windows is started and usable, and every month I have one more Window that I have to close on startup, for some reason.
Fuckin Teams opening my last chat in foreground when I log in, great design MS!
This has been a non issue for some time.
It takes less than 15 seconds for me to boot to desktop. If I put it in sleep mode I save about 5-10 seconds. Hardly worth it IMO.
Seriously, it takes longer for me to set up my windows again than it does for my computer to boot, and that probably could be solved too if I had the time. Forget sleep modes, they don't matter if the computer boots fast enough.
This article is a wall of text spreading fake info. The sleep states work fine in windows if you have any idea how it works. And this has been the case for at least 8 years.
If you have any issue go into cmd type powercfg -requests and windows will tell you what is keeping it awake.
And doubling down if you really want your pc to wake if its off and you slap your keyboard just tweak your bios wake options and done.
This shit is so obnoxious I’ve started having to use hibernate again.
Potentially my mac does the same thing, but it doesn’t wake itself up stealing monitors, running fans at 100%, and becoming a space heater like the two windows computers I have. If it does wake itself up, then I don’t notice.
wow they’re just like me
I had the same problem with my work-issued Thinkpad. No overheating, but frequently pulling the laptop out of the bag and finding battery dead. Solution I found was to bind the power-button to "hibernate", and just using that any time I knew I was going to be putting it away into my bag.
One problem I ran into writing my first Windows Store application like 10 years ago was that Windows Store seemed to have no interest in mobile-style security where you request permissions one-at-a-time and only the ones you need - the intended workflow was that you either requested no secure privs and let your app be "untrusted", or you made your app "trusted" and requested all the privs. This was actively recommended by MS.
Of course, this means "wake from sleep" would be something that every app would have permission to do accidentally, even if they didn't want to.
I managed to fiddle around with my work Dell laptop and disable that nonsense. I think it was called "modern standby". I don't understand why this isn't considered a fire hazard. It was terrifying to leave my laptop in my backpack until I figured out the fix.
Yep, while my Extreme Gen 4 has a BIOS toggle, my work-issued T14 Gen 3 does not so I had to get IT to come in and enable hibernate. Prior to that it seemed like it had less battery life sleeping than awake. (ex: fully charged and confirmed that the power light is flashing before flight - few hours later it's 100% dead.)
It's because one of your peripherals is set to wake state.
I turned my mouse and keyboard off from this.
Now I manually have to touch my power button to wake.
It didn't have any peripherals, I mean, like, external USB ones.
This also happens on Linux, after 20 seconds, my computer just wakes up 😠 (definitely not because I don't have enough disk space)
It's because one of your peripherals is set to wake state.
I turned my mouse and keyboard off from this.
Now I manually have to touch my power button to wake.
Had the nic set to that. Any package on the network. Did not matter who it was for. If the nic saw it, it would wake the machine up.
You didn't get it. It's because I didn't have enough disk space, my partition was too small. I also deleted files from the trash and it works.
My girlfriend laptop turns on in the middle of the nights for no fucking reason. As a Linux user this shit is creepy
My PC used to do this. I would pull the plug sometimes in order to prevent it from happening
Spotify of all things used to wake my computer from sleep. I was so close to migrating away from them when they fixed it.
Windows also loves to turn itself on for updates, but then not put itself back to sleep after....
Mine started acting up a couple of weeks ago. I've since switched to Linux. I can't have a PC that powers on throughout the night. Eats power.
My work issued E15 Ryzen 5000 sleeps and hibernates fine. Plus it lasts a long time in both. I wonder if it’s an Intel bug.
Hibernate is a different function
Yet they’re linked. Still, the machine has zero issues with Windows sleeping.
Isn't that a Lenovo model? I noticed they weren't mentioned in the article and wondered if that was on purpose or just an oversight. My cheap IdeaPad also sleeps fine...but it also has an AMD cpu.
Yes. Lenovo E15. Excellent work laptop honestly.
Can anyone explain how this is different from Power Nap on Macs? I’ve never heard anyone upset about that.
LTT had a great video on that. Basically Windows has a bug which sometimes prevents this sleep mode from working correctly and that nukes battery life. Microsoft has promised a fix, but apparently it's not resolved still. In theory it should work exactly the same as Power Nap. It sometimes does, but sometimes - not so much.
P.S. Power Nap used to be buggy as well, but Apple fixed it years ago.
Decades old bugs aren't uncommon on Microsoft products.
Thanks for the details! When Power Nap was new I didn’t have a Mac that could use it. I think it used newer Intel tech than what my Mac had at the time IIRC.
Yeah, at this point I either leave the computer on or shut it down. Sleep and Hibernate are both too unreliable.
Yeah, shit like this (but by no means limited to this) is why I use Linux exclusively for my personal computers. It used to be that putting a Linux laptop to sleep was a hit-or-miss affair that took a lot of configuration. Now it just works, no muss no fuss.
I've just started turning off my PC when I'm done with it because a mouse farting on the mouse will wake it up. Also if I do manage to get it to sleep it wakes itself up every few hours to check for updates.
“The always-on nature of phones and tablets is incredibly convenient. Wouldn’t it be great if your (non-ARM) laptop or desktop could do this too?”
Easy, get an M series Mac :P
Didn’t some tech youtubers talk about this a few months ago? I swear I remember seeing a video on this…
LTT did a big video with all the details.
I actually like suspend to RAM. Makes my laptop usable after sleep a bit faster. But absolutely not on Windows because then my fans are still spinning after minutes like many have reported. But I was simply able to disable that with a registry tweak and it's now going to regular ACPI S3 when I close the lid. Is my Framework Laptop 13 (i5-1240P) an uncommon exception?
Is my Framework Laptop 13 (i5-1240P) an uncommon exception?
Yes. Laptop manufacturers are disable s3 sleep in firmware. Framework explicitly gives that freedom because they don't suck
Does suspend to ram drain battery?
Yes depending on the sleep state. Also some power is going to ram to keep it alive. I think for framework it's in the realm of 5% an hour or something like that.
I usually go the hibernation route.
Desktops I sleep to ram, laptops I hibernate to the SSD.
They can if they don't use "Modern Standby" or whatever. My Zen 4 PC sleeps just fine, fans stopping and all. Just had to disable allowing network adapters to wake the device from sleep in device manager, else random broadcast messages could cause the standby to end.
taking control of wake timers is definitely the way to go
This has literally been a problem since Windows ever came into being. I remember long nights of wrestling with this garbage on Jurassic versions of Windows.
I have one laptop running Windows and I just changed the BIOS/UEFI setting so that closing the display turns off the computer.
Also handy for Linux distros with poor standby/sleep support.
Pretty drastic, I can imagine losing some work accidentally because of that (closing with improper connection to external monitor). Why not hibernate?
Really depends on your devices use case. That isn't my daily driver and the trade off of not having a dead laptop is worth it for my needs of this device.
It is pretty reliable. In all Windows 10 years I have never had any issue with that method as well. Besides, I save often.
Btw, if my pc wakes up seconds after if try to manually via XfCE power menu, but sleeps fine by itself (20 minutes inactivity), what could that be?
Check journal, you should see either an error or a wakeup reason
Check the BIOS/firmware, there are different sleep states for Windows and Linux that can be configured. Some just refuse to sleep properly. I had a Dell laptop that would sleep and then wake up when I closed the lid and then stay awake.
There was a work around to prevent laptops to drain trough the night whilst in sleep. Removing the power cable before closing the lid activates a different sleep mode, than closing the lid with the power cable still connected.
Linus tech tips dit a video on this a while ago. If I recall correctly.
My ARM laptop is great. Was dirt cheap and it's pretty damn good for what it is
neither does your car or TV
