this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023

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141

Windows PCs can't sleep properly, and Microsoft wants it that way (www.spacebar.news)

submitted 11 months ago by corbin@infosec.pub to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 37 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

That explains why my 2017 Dell XPS 13 9360 with an 8th gen i7 never went to sleep properly. Originally it would just keep running the fans and the battery would drain. Then after a while it seemed to start sleeping but never turned on again so you'd have to reboot anyway. In the end I wiped Windows 11 off it and installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Now shutting the lid works just fine.

I also have an XPS 13 9310 with an 11th gen i7 and Windows 11, and if I close the lid it seems to sleep but sometimes I come back to a completely dead battery.

I don't really understand the point of Modern Standby. Who wants the laptop to do things when it's closed and possibly in a backpack with no ventilation? That's when we want it not to do things.

[–] min0nim@aussie.zone 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is one area where Apple has it pretty right. A Mac will do somethings when ‘asleep’ like download emails and texts. It also can broadcast its location if the ‘Find Me’ function is on. If it’s plugged into power then backups will also run, and background app updates will happen. It does this in a low power mode, so it won’t get hot enough to need fans. It’s worked flawlessly for 20 years. Meanwhile all our PCs are set to ‘never sleep’ and just get shutdown when not in use. I never trust a PC laptop to wake successfully from sleep just by closing the lid.

[–] kayazere@feddit.nl 7 points 11 months ago

I have problems where when my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro will have been “asleep” for days in a backpack and then I try and use my Bluetooth headphones on another device, it will connect to the asleep Macbook.

I solved it by running a small program that kills Bluetooth when the laptop goes to sleep.

[–] Jesus_666@feddit.de 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

People are using their smartphones instead of their PCs. That hurts sales. So PCs need to behave more like smartphones, e.g. by being able to notify you of new messages at all times. Then people will surely ditch their smartphones again and buy laptops.

Intel, Microsoft et al never considered that that's fundamentally not how PCs should work.

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[–] MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org 30 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Bad behavior in Windows article up on the Fediverse for four hours and no one telling us how their Linux laptop doesn't have this problem?

My Linux laptop doesn't have this problem 😁.

Sounds like it's a combo of bad Windows behavior and buggy implementations, but had to deliver the joke first.

[–] jlow@beehaw.org 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

My Linux laptop doesn't have this problem as well except for when I have an external drive plugged via USB which was almost always for backups: then it makes the screen go black and turns the fans on 100% and stays that way. Forever. If I'm fast enough there's a small window of time where I can mash random buttons to make it wake up again. Luckily this doesn't seem to happen with external SSDs plugged in via USB so it's all good 🤷‍♀️

[–] peter@feddit.uk 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

My Linux laptop doesn't have this problem, in fact it enters such a deep sleep that it needs to be force shutdown and rebooted if I remove any USB device whilst it's asleep

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[–] Frederic@beehaw.org 6 points 11 months ago

No, if your motherboard/BIOS/ACPI/CPU does not support S3, linux will not magically implement it. This has nothing to do with Windows.

[–] iegod@lemm.ee 5 points 11 months ago

My Linux laptop goes to sleep, but not without errors. Every time I close open that lid it's a bunch of terminal errors about devices, notably bluetooth. Cool. Thumbs up

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[–] yum13241@lemm.ee 30 points 11 months ago (1 children)

To make it worse, newer Intel CPUs can't even enter S3 state.

[–] 30p87@feddit.de 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I was kinda shocked to switch from an i5-6300U to a i5-1145G7 and not find more options in /sys/power/mem_sleep, but literally only s2idle. At least it works (i believe).

Maybe actual hibernation works now, too.

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[–] smeg@feddit.uk 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The important part, for the lazy:

For Modern Standby to work properly, the device Windows is running on needs to support it. That includes hardware like network interfaces and USB, but also support from system firmware and device drivers. But Microsoft doesn’t seem to have any sort of certification process or runtime hardware check for Modern Standby compatibility.

[–] albert180@feddit.de 4 points 11 months ago

Easy fix, it will be a requirement for Windows 12, unfortunately you all need to buy new computers ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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[–] Frederic@beehaw.org 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Good luck if you can, on some new motherboards you cannot disable S0x in the BIOS and cannot enable S3 as it does not exist anymore.

You can only use this "S0 idle" which is like your cellphone sleeping, meaning everything runs and/or is somewhat disabled in background. Instead of the BIOS disabling things, it's the OS and the applications and drivers that have to take steps to go sleeping but it's way from perfect and takes power anyway.

Problem is with laptop. A laptop in S3 (suspend to RAM) can last a few days, a laptop in S0 idle will last a few hours.

[–] rwhitisissle@beehaw.org 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

So if I have my laptop in bed at night and then close the laptop lid to go to sleep and wake up, the reason the battery is fucking dead is because the laptop never actually "sleeps" - it just enters a lower power state while still draining battery relatively aggressively?

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[–] MudMan@kbin.social 14 points 11 months ago

It's so bad for Widnows handhelds, laptops and tablets I've resorted to re-enabling hybernation and using that instead.

Which I'm sure will be disabled as an option at some random point in time with no warning.

[–] noddy@beehaw.org 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I feel like this is about tracking. As in microsoft want the PC to wake up and scan wifi networks to figure out where it is, so they can use this data for targeted ads they serve in the start menu and bing, etc.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 8 points 11 months ago (4 children)

The myth about ads in the Windows start menu is strong on Lemmy. I've not once got an ad in Windows. There is certainly bloatware but nothing is actively pushing ads to you. My Windows 11 start menu looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/4bBHT3V.png It's simple and has no ads. The only thing you could argue is an ad is my weather and news widget that comes with Windows 11 but I had to explicitly activate that and I wanted the feed to be there.

[–] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

It's not a myth - I just fired up the install of Windows I have in a virtual machine. It's a clean install, downloaded direct from Microsoft with a license key the gave me through their Developer Program... absolutely nothing has ever been installed on it, and the start menu has ads for:

Office 365
Spotify
WhatsApp
LInkedIn
There's a note under that - the more you use your device, the more we'll show "New Apps" here. So presumably if it wasn't a clean install, I'd see more ads in the start menu.
Even worse - the Task Bar has an ad for Microsoft Teams. I can't figure out how to remove that one either - right click does nothing, left click asks me if I want to "get started" with installing Teams. At least the ones in the start menu can be removed with a few clicks.

They are definitely ads - when you click on them it takes you to the Microsoft store page... except for Office 365 which I assume is part of OneDrive - I can forgive that one, since it's part of their free cloud storage service and probably should be integrated into the OS. If you're not doing cloud storage of some kind, you should be.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

To argue those are ads would be equal to arguing anything preinstalled on Linux is ads or anything preinstalled on your phone is ads.

[–] Scrath@feddit.de 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The difference is that these programs are not preinstalled. They are shortcuts to install said program.

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[–] Sloogs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Maybe, but Microsoft's competitors are doing a lot better on the battery life front so they're leaving a lot on the table for competitors to swoop in by not fixing their sleep and wake issues. It was a big consideration for the company I work at to go with Apple machines because they do lots of field work and need the machines running all day. I can say from experience it's incredibly frustrating to leave home with my MS Surface on a full charge only for it to have majority of the battery drained by the time I pull it out of my backpack due to waking up when it wasn't supposed to.

[–] toothpicks@beehaw.org 12 points 11 months ago

Sad that the computers can't get any rest :(((((

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 11 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I also want it that way. Keeping my steam games updated or keeping apps like discord or slack showing me online is great. I'd rather a modern operating system solve modern issues with modern solutions. They really should have a mode like this in Linux if they don't already.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just because you won't use a feature doesn't mean the feature shouldn't work for anyone ever. That would be like Windows having a bug where it's stuck in colorblind mode, and a colorblind person comes along and says, "that's fine, I want it that way".

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 7 points 11 months ago (4 children)

First, you can shutdown completely. You can either issue a command line "shutdown /s now" or you can go uncheck the option "Turn On Fast Startup (Recommended)" It's not a removal of a feature.

Second, this is a default option and Microsoft is choosing the one that works for most humans. You are demanding the thing that inconveniences the most people be the default. So it'd be like a colorblind person demanding that the colorblind mode that works for them be the default way because they are slightly inconvenienced by going to the settings.

[–] MayonnaiseArch@beehaw.org 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Having an option to choose s3 inconveniences most humans? Wtf? And the clearly broken option is good? Are we on reddit?

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[–] SHOW_ME_YOUR_ASSHOLE@lemm.ee 11 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I'd like the option of choosing between partial sleep and full sleep. When I pack up my work laptop for the weekend it sucks getting to a Monday morning meeting and having the laptop be dead.

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[–] upstream@beehaw.org 6 points 11 months ago (4 children)

As a Mac user at work I just close the lid and put the laptop in my back. Windows users shut down and power up again the next day.

Whenever I bring this topic up IRL people inundate me with stories about how much issues arise if they just sleep their computers.

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[–] koorogi@kbin.social 5 points 11 months ago (4 children)

For a phone I'm are more likely than not to have with me, I could understand. But for a laptop, and especially for a desktop, if the machine is asleep, I'm not at it. Why is it great for a computer I don't have with me to show me as online in discord or slack?

[–] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

It shouldn't show you as online in discord/slack, but it should be downloading messages/etc so that when you do come online you don't have to wait for it to sync with all your cloud services.

Also - consider those cloud services might not necessarily be available when you come online - maybe you open your laptop on a train in an underground tunnel or something.

Macs do a good job at this. They have "high efficiency" CPU cores which are still very fast (like, very fast*) but draw about half as much power as the regular cores. Software is also able to schedule background tasks based on various things like power level, network connectivity, how often the user actually launches your app on this device (maybe you have an app installed on all your devices but only actually use it on your phone...).

Background tasks like checking emails, backing up your computer, installing security patches, etc will all run while your Mac is sleeping.

Anti-theft features run even fully powered off. So unplug the battery, and never plug it back in, if you're going to steal anything with an Apple logo... the fact you can never turn it on does hurt the resale value, but that's better than going to jail. It'll phone home as soon as you boot it up too, and even after a full factory reset is still probably tied to the actual owner. You'll need the owner or Apple to deregister it - and Apple is likely to call the cops unless you've got a good story.

(* to give you an idea how fast the "Efficiency Cores" are on a Mac — in Game Mode the "Performance" cores are powered down, because the efficiency ones are more than fast enough and generate less heat - which allows the GPU to be pushed to the limit of the cooling system. The "efficiency" mostly comes from reducing features like speculative execution... though they do also run at a lower clock speed - as in ~3Ghz instead of ~4Ghz)

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[–] peter@feddit.uk 4 points 11 months ago

I would love it if this is how Windows worked for me, but I've never successfully had a Windows machine sleep, wake up to update and then sleep again

[–] ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Huh, is this also why my gaming PCs the last 5 or so years are absolutely dogshit at staying asleep? I've never come across the term even though I've spent too much time troubleshooting and identifying which peripheral woke the computer up. The most annoying thing is that there is a toggle for "allow wake event" in device manager but it seems to be a mild suggestion at best... For some devices like keyboard and mouse it's 50/50 if it does anything it seems. I've resorted to just locking and shutting the screen off...

[–] Ralis@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I swear Microsoft is intentionally trying to drive me away to Linux. Tried everything you can imagine to stop my pc from waking up when I put to sleep or hibernation. Yet the best I can get is it always waking up first time and then properly sleeping after the second attempt. I'm only stopped because of VR and dumb Anti cheat in a few games.

[–] bufke@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

You're going to hate that laptops like the Dell xps 13 specifically stopped supporting the better, older s3 sleep. Though in some cases linux may work well with "modern standby". It still isn't as good as s3.

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[–] kayazere@feddit.nl 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Doesn’t this waste more power being connected rather than actually sleeping? With a laptop lid closed, there’s no screen to show notifications on. What’s the point of this?

[–] Thisfox@sopuli.xyz 7 points 11 months ago

The point is that Microsoft can run malware whenever and however they like. It is not useful for the user.

[–] taanegl@beehaw.org 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Tell me why~!

[–] zero_gravitas@aussie.zone 5 points 11 months ago

Ain't nothin' but a heartache

[–] HumbleHobo@beehaw.org 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This is one reason I have a "hibernate" shortcut on my desktop so I don't have to deal with the hassle of having to hunt for that button.

If you are curious, creating your own hibernate shortcut on windows is easy:

Right click desktop
Select new > shortcut
Copy this into the shortcut: "C:\Windows\System32\shutdown.exe /h" obviously replace C:\Windows\ with the installation drive/folder on your machine.
(Optional: Change the icon for the shortcut to a useful picture)
Done

[–] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Like all these complaints about Windows: this can be changed in the settings

[–] rikonium@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 11 months ago

Mostly incorrect, entering the BIOS and having the toggle to switch between S0 and S3 (or, "Linux") sleep does indeed exist but it is hard to identify what models have it (I hear Lenovo's BIOS simulator helps) and it's increasingly being removed in newer models or even removed in updates. Dell has no interest in putting it back and recommends hibernate or just powering off the machine when on-the-go.

I made sure the ThinkPad I own personally had the toggle but my work-issued one does not so it is now a Hibernate-only machine. No setting can help that.

[–] tojikomori@kbin.social 5 points 11 months ago

Apparently not in Windows settings:

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.

Side note: for a while, there was actually a registry setting you could change to disable Modern Standby on the Windows side. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed it, and to my knowledge, has never added it back.

I'm not a Windows user, so I can't confirm one way or the other, but toward the end of the end of the article the author gives vendor-specific instructions for disabling the S0 Low Power Idle capability from BIOS.

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