> Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The PC will overheat as a result of that action. Any resulting damage will not be covered by the Dell warranty.
Incredible. I have a Dell laptop and luckily I haven't had any catastrophes but I have seen it woken up a couple of times when it was just sitting there with its lid closed and nothing attached.
What they actually say:
"Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The PC will overheat as a result of that action. Any resulting damage will not be covered by the Dell warranty."
Fair enough. A laptop that overheats because it's been left in an enclosed space whilst not off is not damage caused by a fault of the device.
I don't think this is clickbait; I think any normal user would think that closing the lid puts the laptop into a state where putting it in a bag is entirely safe to do.
Microsoft seems to have decided to entirely break this expectation such that closing the lid of a laptop puts it into this weird not-really-suspended state, such that putting it in a confined space could cause it to overheat. It's... pretty user-unfriendly and IMO stupid.
Exactly. I would personally consider damage caused by an unreliable suspend mode (whether an issue of software or hardware) to be an example of manufacturer defect.
The problem is that Windows defect breaks laptops not under warranty by Microsoft. Getting refund would be tricky, and voiding Dell warranty in such case seems justified.
The problem is that windows is bundled, so they are definitely responsible for putting defective software on their defective laptop. Putting suspended laptop in a backpack cannot void warranty. This is like from another universe or what.
You could argue this for pretty much anything? Your mac screen failure is LG's fault, not Apple's. Your Asus GPU's failure is Nvidia's fault, not Asus's. Your internet outage is Cisco's fault, not your ISP's.
Ultimately the company selling to the end user has to stand over the package they're selling.
> I think any normal user would think that closing the lid puts the laptop into a state where putting it in a bag is entirely safe to do.
Closing the lid does not necessarily turn the laptop off at all (by design). I think most people have had that experience. In fact the lid may be closed with the laptop fully on.
In any case, they make is explicit and clear exactly to avoid any such assumption.
The title is obviously clickbait because of course you can put your Dell laptop in a bag and of course that does not void the warranty.
Most people I know are not techincal and think that closing the lapton shuts it down, or something equivalent and I don't think any of them knows anything about Modern Standby.
But I agree title could have been more clear if it included a reference to stand by.
The fault lies with Microsoft, mismanaging the user expectations about shutting down the computer.
The computer should absolutely not wake up from sleep to do things, if the result could be that it overheats. It's like saying people shouldn't pocket their smartphones.
I once investigated why a PC occasionally turned on all by itself and at first suspected that something on the network might be sending wake on LAN packets. It turned out that the PC was only in sleep mode and not hibernating and that Windows can wake it up from there, e.g. because of scheduled maintenance. What was even more surprising, it will go back to sleep once it is done.
You might want to check the event viewer in cases like that.
This explains why my old windows laptop is constantly out of juice whenever I need to do something with Windows, even though I was sure I set it to hibernate.
The last time I turned it of, I removed the battery. It is pretty silly that my laptop in 2021 can't do what my first laptop could do in 2003. Even worse, it is a Thinkpad. I expect better from those.
The issue is that Windows doesn't go into S3 sleep when you close the lid; it goes into a weird not-really-asleep state for... some reason that I don't agree with[0]. I guess that state is "hot" enough that you could damage the laptop by putting it in a bag while in that state.
Fortunately I've been running Linux on my XPS 13, which I have put into a bag hundreds of times (maybe even over a thousand) while suspended. Linux's suspend does actually use the "cold" S3 suspend state, so this is safe.
[0] It's called "Modern Standby" (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...), which... honestly sounds really stupid to me. "Modern Standby" presumably drains the battery orders of magnitude faster than a normal S3 standby. I can't imagine ever wanting this behavior. I'm entirely fine with my laptop taking ~10 seconds to wake up and reconnect to whatever network I'm near.
>Switching between S3 and Modern Standby cannot be done by changing a setting in the BIOS. Switching the power model is not supported in Windows without a complete OS re-install.
and on Reddit
>Warning: if your laptop is newer than 2019, there is a high chance, your OEM removed any S3 code from the bios, and your laptop will crash entering S3 and you have to force hold power key to restart and then delete the registry entry again to revert back to modern standby.
What does "never wakes up" mean? I thought I had the same problem but then I discovered that closing and opening the lid is the only way to get it to wake. Neither the power button (it turns it off) nor keypresses (they do nothing) work.
I think I tried everything, from buttons to lid to magic network packets. Once in S3 it's dead Jim, and there's nothing in the BIOS to change that behavior.
The irony is that I have a 4 years old XPS 13 where everything works like a charm, even under Linux. Talk about progress ...
It's terrible. I remember being woken up one night because my laptop decided to wake up and resume the Netflix video I'd be watching earlier. No input devices connected, lid closed. Another time it cooked in my bag because windows wanted to do an update on shut down so I slept it instead.
I have a 2017 XPS model so I the firmware supports S3 sleep. There is no modal in the BIOS though. I had to trick windows into thinking it didn't support modern sleep.
Based on posts from others trying to do the same thing, it used to be a single registery key edit. Now it's convoluted and required fiddling with WiFi power controls. The end result it sleeps properly but takes anywhere from 10 seconds (good) to more than a minute (bad) to connect to WiFi when woken up.
Of course on Linux it just works.
Back when I was looking into this I found someone who'd found a way to patch the acpi table to enable it for the newer models (at risk of bricking the device entirely). Alas I can't find the link any more.
I won't buy another Dell until this is fixed.
My work laptop is an X1 carbon and it supports only S3 sleep so it just works.
I've got a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 which doesn't advertise S3. It's a really nice machine, but having to wait several months after getting it for someone out there who understands these things to come up with the right combination of kernel code and ACPI patches so I could shut the lid and not have it just reset when I opened it back up again was something I could have done without. Fortunately it's got the capability, it just needed turning on.
I have dell XPS, it had perfectly functional sleep and could be put in a bag. Then 'modern standby' was added in an update and it ruine the laptop - if I place it in the bag in the morning, by linchtime it will be crazy hot and the battery will be gone. And you cannot diaable this feature. I don't get wtf these people are smoking.
On my Dell, this problem happens when you suspend the laptop from software (either with pm-suspend or systemctl suspend). If you simply close the lid, it seems to enter in a different "mode" of suspend, the real one, where you can carry it without overheating and the battery lasts for weeks.
On my side I am quite happy that the hardware+software can support some kind of fast wake-up (similar to Macbooks and smartphones instead of needing >10 seconds to wake up when I open the lid). I just do a real shutdown when I don't need the laptop anymore.
And precisely : as it was said by someone else above, on modern computers with SSDs, I would rather disable "fast startup" so that the computer really shutdowns when I ask him to (which is also useful when you have dual-boot and your Linux systems wants to get r/w access to the NTFS partition)
But I admit that the computer could/should automatically enter in suspend-to-disk after being in "modern standby" for more than e.g. 5 minutes, and this should be configurable.
The value of fast wakeup is real. But manufacturers and OS vendors need to actually get their act together and implement this, not fake it in a way that passes reviews but is actually damaging to hardware in the real world.
Exactly. It's entirely possible to implement fast wakeups, but it requires thoughtful design. Smartphone go to sleep opportunistically whenever you shutdown the screen. Even an Intel CPU could probably do this in less than 500ms (and that is a boatload of cycles).
The "fast startup" cause a lot of problems for us. If you "shutdown" you're not doing a full shutdown.... You’re really only doing a full shutdown when you select “Restart” instead as evidenced by the uptime clock in task manager.
It's like Windows broke the simplest button ... just shut it down!
I have the same machine for work: early this year sleep mode was not very useful (it wouldn't pass a weekend), but after an Ubuntu upgrade a few months ago it got much better. Yet, it's still worse than my 6 year old ThinkPad.
I purchased one of those 1st gen Windows on ARM laptops (HP Envy) specifically for the "instant on" / modern standby feature. It worked perfectly, just like a smartphone, until I received a major Windows update. Now it wakes slowly ruining the only good thing about that device. I've now been burned twice in a row by MS and will likely not purchase another product from them again.
True but you can enable it on some laptops by telling the firmware setup that your OS is Linux. I'm not sure what Linux S2idle is in ACPI lingo, but that's what Linux uses on my newest lapop by default. S3 (suspend-to-RAM) is not available to the kernel. And yet it's a power hog compared to just not using the laptop and letting the display backlight turn off, roughly 1% battery life loss per hour in S2idle. Whereas it's about 0.5% battery life loss per hour in whatever Windows 10 is doing for laptop lid close.
Not really in practice though - to rephrase, you can only put it in a bag if it's shut down - how many people do that frequently other than to reboot for some reason? How many of those do it every time they put it in a bag? As if on your commute to work for example you're going to power on when you get on the train, shut down again when you get off, power on again when you get into the office, off again when you leave, ... (and if the job involves lots of client meetings, or presentations in another building..!)
> With regards to transporting your laptop, you must first turn the laptop OFF
This has been a problem for already quite long. I remember my very old laptop overheating if being put in the backpack in Standby mode.
Nowadays I in fact don't just turn laptops Off the default way. I go and disable the "fast start up" (Control Panel - Power Options - Choose what the power buttons do) to make sure the computer gets turnt of for real rather than using yet another flavour of hibernation. And it still starts very fast (a couple of seconds longer perhaps) so I see no reason for these "fast start up" and "modern stand-by" modes to even exist now as we have fast SSDs and everything.
Besides starting up fast, another important value standby modes add is freeing you from having to open, position and initialize (open the documents/locations in them) all your apps manually every time. But this seems trivial to be reached by adding functions to just save the list of opened apps, their windows positions and the actual documents which were opened in them. This will require some coordinated effort from both the OS and the apps developers though.
This is so infuriating, because this problem has already been solved once. It's called "Hibernation", and was added in Windows 95. This should write your MEM image to disk, power the laptop completely off and allow later restoring where you left when powering your laptop back on. But laptop manufacturers (including Apple) thought it somehow smart to remove true hibernation, and replace it with some botched "deep sleep" that is not actually working, as it does not actually turn the computer OFF. This is SO infuriating - who thought it smart to REGRESS on a solution that has worked so well for DECADES?
Anyone who is concerned about this should already be using full-disk encryption, which means the memory contents are actually better protected during hibernation than in a live state.
This is one thing that usually Linux gets mostly right .. only if the proprietary GPU drivers played along. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Apple certainly could implement this properly but instead decide to release a new half-assed half-hibernation after another.
AFAIK this is only an issue if you think UEFI Secure Boot and TPM are a good idea. The traditional way to implement full-disk encryption on Linux is by disabling UEFI validation and deriving the key from a passphrase rather than storing it in the TPM.
Personally I'd rather keep secure boot and just disable the kernel lockdown feature. You still gain a significant amount of security while maintaining functionality that way.
I have a 64 GB Mac with SSD and managed to trick it to use true hibernation (Apple does not want you to know it but you can still achieve true hibernation by enabling disk encryption (FileVault™) and forcing key material erasure from MEM on standby with `sudo pmset -a DestroyFVKeyOnStandBy 1`). I just timed it and bootup from hibernation to UI took 25 seconds, out of which maybe 5 seconds were taken by inputtting the encryption password.
Certainly not a show-stopper, if this means not accidentally killing my €2k+ laptop because it decides to randomly wake up in my bag.
Sorry.. I meant exactly that 25 seconds to boot up from hibernation is definitely not an issue. Why would it be? I store the laptop hibernated. I need to dehibernate exactly once a day. I work 8 hours a day, meaning less then a promille of my working day is spent waiting for my laptop to dehibernate. It's a non-issue.
I have a Dell laptop I bought within the last couple of months. Hibernate is not in the start menu, and the option to add it to the start menu has been disabled.
It's still possible to assign "hibernate" as the action taken in response to various power-related actions such as closing the lid or pressing the power button. This makes no sense; I'm not sure what's going on.
You can enable the start menu hibernate button in advanced power settings:
System -> Power & sleep -> Additional power settings -> Choose what the power buttons do -> Change settings that are currently unavailable -> Check Hibernate.
And then get lucky that your laptop wakes up again (mine dies 1 out of 10 times)
Maybe you have Group Policy settings? Sometimes "Windows tweaker" type apps install these. Also, mine has a link "Change settings that are currently unavailable" which shows a UAC prompt and then enables all checkboxes.
you have 32 GiB of RAM, gibibytes, meaning 32 * 1024^3. does your drive write at 3 GB/s (gigabytes) or Gb/s (gigabits)? if little b bits, it'll be more like 80 sec
if this comment is serious i strongly suggest you inform yourself about nvme drives. they're absolutely worth their money.
i haven't encountered anyone in years that didn't have at least one in their pc/laptop, but if you dont: i strongly suggest you buy one. because writing 30 Gbyte sequentially generally does takes about 10 seconds.
When I got my work laptop, first thing I did is erased its NVMe SSD by writing garbage. It was fast first 30 seconds. In the end sustained write speed was around 60 MB/s. My old HDD works faster. It's fast enough in day-to-day usage, though.
I'll be honest. i haven't encountered a single workload in which i had to write over 90 GByte over 30 seconds (3gbyte sustained for 30 seconds), so you could be correct. Even benchmarks are generally done within 10-15 seconds and my IO is usually constrained by network or CPU at that point.
not sure how that would in any way impact a hibernate routine which would very rarely have to store more then 64gb though.
If your drive is actually capable of sustained 3 GB/s write it would be ~11.5 seconds. However typical NVMe drives are closer to ~2 GB/s sustained which would be more like 17 seconds. (Note GB 8 * 10^9 bits and GiB 8 * 1024^3 bits.)
I guess most people have 16 GiB RAM or less though. I'm not sure why an ~10 second wait is too long given that the user intentionally selected hibernate instead of sleep.
It isn't. It can add just some seconds (probably less than 5 on fast SSDs, even less if you don't have too much RAM). If people can't wait this little they need to have their lives / jobs / mental health fixed rather than add more orders of complexity (with according increase in problems) into the computers.
On my work laptop (modern HP Elitebook), sleep doesn't work at all (laptop just turns on again after going to sleep), so I'm using hibernate exclusively. Waking up from hibernate takes longer than one minute.
On the other hand, my private laptop (Huawei Matebook) wakes up from sleep in less than 10 seconds.
Seems like something is wrong. Are extra BIOS checks enabled? My Linux Redmibook with 16 GB of RAM and a cheap SSD takes 5-6 seconds to restore from hibernate.
On my MateBook 13 (2020) the Fn and Shift Lock lights are turned on, while the laptop is still powerd on, but not under OS control anymore:
Sleep takes 6 seconds down and 2 seconds up.
Hibernation is 9 seconds down and 20isch seconds up.
Shutdown is 20isch down and Boot is 22isch to desktop (fastboot=off).
Fedora doesn't even create swap partitions anymore, so you have to enable that first to enable hibernation, enabling it requires you to create a swap-partition, change things in systemd and meddle with the grub-configuration: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/fedora-hibernate.html
if you use secure boot, you cannot use hibernation under fedora (or any Linux, afaik) since there is no way to "seal" the hibernation image from modification by an attacker who could mount the swap on another OS where they have root. this is regardless of disk encryption.
I don't know precisely how secure boot works under fedora, but you can have FDE with swap just fine in Linux. A swap partition can live inside a LVM logical volume.
For secure boot I would guess you could have the EFI partition signed/validated with the TPM.
In my case, I use SecureBoot to check the boot image's signature (contains the kernel + initrd + boot params). Then it starts everything from an LVM that lives on top of LUKS. I always have to type in the password (never bothered to get the TPM working), but I don't see why the TPM wouldn't be able to do it.
From the system boot point of view, it just starts an OS. The OS will then proceed to load some data in RAM. It's its business whether this is "fresh" data for a new boot, or "old" data from the last boot.
"Cannot" this is not true. It might not satisfy some sort of branding requirement but at the end of the day all a secure boot implementation does under the hood is to verify the kernel against the signing keys stored in the firmware before handing off control to it. The kernel can do whatever it pleases after that including granting you root access, joining a botnet, or, indeed, loading a hibernation image.
As for security, the hibernation image is at risk unless you use full disk encryption. But then (last time I checked) so is the typical Linux distro because ultimately you (the end user) have complete control over the OS. That means that at some point the kernel has to load and run privileged code that was never signed by some central authority. The only alternative to this would be sending all drivers to be signed by someone else, even those you built yourself from source.
tl;dr You can in fact use hibernation if you set it up, even with secure boot. Doing so is not a security issue. Lack of full disk encryption is always a security issue if physical access is an attack vector you are concerned about.
Huh TIL. Apparently the mainline kernel got a lockdown feature in version 5.4 that prohibits this. Ubuntu started shipping with a version of the patches in 2018. So I guess you'll have to disable that "helpful" feature first if you want to restore functionality.
Secure boot is not that useful anyway. I'm kind of security freak, but I decided that security boot is not worth it. My disk is encrypted to protect from stolen laptop. My BIOS and grub have password to protect from someone using keyboard. Scenario with someone meddling with my boot partition and replacing my kernel with modified one is just not realistic for my life. So just disable it and enjoy proper hibernation, that's my opinion.
TBF hibernation has never been entirely reliable under Linux due to hardware vendors being difficult (IIUC). Getting it working for me has typically involved trying to make sense of arcane kernel log messages. I never managed to on my current laptop.
I don't really understand why is it the case. I could understand that sleep is a complex mode, when hardware have to properly sleep and restore. But hibernate is just dumping RAM to disk. It should not require anything special from underlying hardware.
Because reinitialising all the hardware and bringing it back to the same state is hard, and sometimes impossible with buggy hardware or whose full spec cannot be known..
If you create a swap partition manually during installation and there's no secure boot, Fedora will put the "resume=" parameter into your grub config automatically.
You still need to create `/etc/dracut.conf.d/resume.conf` with `add_dracutmodules+=" resume "` line and regenerate initramfs with `dracut -f`. Then it should work.
I don’t really think that hubernating is worth it when you have gobs of RAM and a lot of data and state in it. The sheer time it’s going to take each time even with an NVMe drive, blergh.
Now that batteries are decent and S3 on Linux is good, I don’t bother with anything else. I reboot/power off my machines on a regular basis to make sure the things I need persisted are, in fact, persisted and everything will be brought up again.
So I was quite surprised to find resume= pointing to my swap partition in my /proc/cmdline after a default install.
Hibernation is not slow on modern PCs (XPS-15 9500 here), the problem is that Windows 10 can wake the PC from Hibernation at any time, and there's no option in BIOS to prevent that.
I chased all the sources using Windows Event-log and "powercfg /lastwake" and then disable each, but it took DAYS to find them all and make sure it now stays in hibernation.
I had this problem with mt desktop PC, which would randomly wake up from hibernation in the middle of the night. My computer was in my bedroom, so this was very much a problem since the bright screen would always wake me up. I couldn't even shut off the screen since it didn't have a power button (Apple Thunderbolt display).
My solution was to reach around to the back of the tower and cycle the PSU power switch after hibernating the PC, every time.
I am quite confused. I thought Windows 10 “fast boot” was hibernation and default “shutdown” behavior. I thought Windows 10 startup times were faster because of hibernation shortcutting the real boot sequence.
Windows 8 and later enable “fast boot” by default which, on shutdown, logs the user out of the current session and then hibernates the logged out state of the OS by writing the RAM contents to disk.
“Full” hibernation is still there, it’s just disabled by default in the UI but not on the OS level.
There’s also this “hybrid sleep” concept introduced since Vista where an OS would go from Sleep state to Hibernate automatically after 180 minutes of Sleep (IIRC, also can be overridden by the OEM) to save the laptop battery further since after the laptop hibernates it’s effectively off.
It’s really confusing and a hell to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. I think Microsoft was trying to apply smart decisions on the OS level _for_ the user but there’s no real indication of what’s actually happening with the system. The naming doesn’t help either, especially after “Modern Sleep” has been introduced.
EDIT: I decided to check myself because I wasn’t sure and it turns out I was indeed wrong. “Hybrid Sleep” is actually about a device going to Sleep and Hibernate simultaneously - it’s so that you can still resume from the hibernated image on the disk in case battery dies while in Sleep. At the same time, you can resume from Sleep right away even before parallel hibernation is finished. I think the intention is that you kinda get the best of both worlds here.
The behavior of going to sleep to hibernate after some time which I’ve described originally is actually something that was there since at least Windows XP.
My Toshiba Libretto seems to have it built into the BIOS. The computer displays a full-screen animation of the Laptop dumping its system memory to disk, and after a few seconds it powers down. Its all very seamless and jank free.
Time to hibernate linearly depends on amount of RAM you have, and whether you have HDD or SSD. On my 16GB T450 (SSD) with Win10 it takes several seconds.
For people who had working hibernation, it may seem so.
For support staff, and for hardware & OS vendors, dealing with customers complaining about hibernation or S3 sleep not working those states were so infuriating and definitely NOT a solved problem.
Example failure modes:
— Doesn't wake when told.
— Immediately wakes instead of staying in low power state.
— Performs a cold boot when trying to wake.
— OS disables desired state with no explanation.
— OS disables desired state which has worked perfectly on that machine for month/years, and OS claims it has been disabled because it is not compatible.
Then they should've worked on fixing those problems, instead of adding even more new ones.
(I admit I haven't used systems with broken hibernates, or at least not any where a little it of troubleshooting could get it working, so that may skew my perception of it.)
Standby actually works 100% properly on my M1 and Intel MacBooks. Flush men to disk is not something I want or need. I quite like the instant availability and have come to expect it of products.
Hibernate works fine on my windows laptop, but it was not the default setting for lid closed. Mine has a performance switch built in. Close it while in high performance mode and the fan would continue to run at full blast. Stupid.
I killed a macbook air exactly like this. It just decided not to shutdown like usual.
Usually I'd put it on sleep mode, or just close the lid and it is fine, but it only took one time for it not to work properly to find the insides of my backpack like a sauna.
It was probably the 2017 model, it had a fan. But it was in the tight pouch within the backpack that was supposed to protect laptops from bumps, so it didn't have much room to breath.
Same thing happened to me with my Surface Book. I found it the next day with fans at max and burning hot. Still survived. Why aren't laptops shutting down when the CPU gets unbearably hot?
"Unbearably hot" for meatbags and "unbearably hot" for CPUs are different things; meatbags start having troubles at 50°C, while internal components are fine until 90-120°C.
Traditional hard disks are the biggest exception, but I'm fairly certain that's not a worry for a Surface.
Even when there's not much fresh air supply, it can circulate the existing air over a larger volume and transfer heat faster into whatever material surrounds it. Doesn't help much, but might be the difference between "it's burning my fingers but still works" and "it died".
The dumb thing is you can't choose to do sleep vs hibernate; you have a system global setting which decides what "sleep" means. (AFAIU You need to have two shell scripts sleep.sh and hibernate.sh to change the hibernate mode if you want to be in control on what's gonna happen)
Computers are complicated, some things are probably released with a tight schedule, things are not formally verified, and therefore have bugs. Hardware or software. It's sad but we have to deal with it.
Sleep has been working well on Linux on the machines I've been using for the past years (especially after removing a defective RAM stick from one of them - and the computer is built in such a way I could do it myself easily!). But yes, once or twice, the computer won't go to sleep because I'm running updates (that I launched manually, mind you), or some other shit.
I've taken the habit of checking that the computer actually went to sleep before putting it in a bag and you should, too, for the one time your Mac won't go to sleep because who knows why.
I'm interested in examples you may have, as someone who once flirted with formal methods.
The most practical use of formal method I witnessed is model checking (with TLA+), but that does not check the actual implementation.
There's also CompCert, a formally verified C compiler written in Coq, but even then, some parts are not verified so the final product may still have bugs.
Tomp was likely talking about the Mac “reopen running apps after reboot” which works very well in terms of putting your state back the way it was. Terminals aren’t fully restored (what would it mean to/how could you restore an ssh connection anyway?), but most apps for most people are.
>Terminals aren’t fully restored (what would it mean to/how could you restore an ssh connection anyway?), but most apps for most people are.
See my post about NeWS ~/.startup.ps event recording and playback above. You could record keyboard events to set up your terminal windows and emacs buffers and shells, and mouse events to open and position windows, pop up and select from menus, press buttons and drag sliders, etc.
Back in the 80's we used unencrypted rlogin with .rhosts files to avoid typing passwords, but now you can restore encrypted shell connections using ssh keys.
The nice thing is that it was WYDIWYG (What You Did Is What You Get), no writing scripts in various shell and emacs scripting languages, just record and playback, like keyboard macros for the window system.
I've been using macs for the past 10 years, and I've never had this problem. I've never even thought about it! I close the lid, I open it, it just works.
Maybe it's just my (2013 Pro and M1 Air), or maybe in the meantime the quality dipped... All in all, as I often say, the best advertisement for Apple is all the other computers.
> I've taken the habit of checking that the computer actually went to sleep before putting it in a bag and you should, too, for the one time your Mac won't go to sleep because who knows why.
How would you even do that? If I open the lid (even just a bit), it turns back on immediately. Also, why do you think it would overheat if it accidentally didn't go to sleep? It's not like it's using fans while being turned on.
Good for you. You probably happen to use your Macs in a way you don't hit those bugs, and didn't have to deal with faulty hardware. I'm sure things are flawless most of the time too.
My computers also go to sleep reliably. They are professional hardware, of good quality, and from different brands. I'm sure other models of other brands or of the same brands have quirks, or that there are people who have problems with the same hardware/software as mine because they use it differently.
Maybe it's not that much a Mac vs the rest of the world thing. Evidence is that people have problems with any kind of hardware and brands, this is indisputable.
> How would you even do that?
There is usually some led visible somewhere, or a small noise, when the thing failed to fall asleep. You know your computer.
Closing the lid has never worked for me on a Windows laptop, even the most expensiveness HP Elitebooks or Dell’a Latitude Pro or whatever. On my MacBook Air, it has never been a problem for 7 years.
It is one of the main reasons I moved to Apple, it is just so much more convenient not having to worry about it.
I've owned an XPS 15 and a 2015 MBP. Had this issue with sleep as well as the funky multi-monitor with distinct DPIs issues off the bat with the XPS, never had any of these problems with the MBP.
> Besides starting up fast, another important value standby modes add is freeing you from having to open, position and initialize (open the documents/locations in them) all your apps manually every time. But this seems trivial to be reached by adding functions to just save the list of opened apps, their windows positions and the actual documents which were opened in them. This will require some coordinated effort from both the OS and the apps developers though.
I just gave up on OS and app developers and implemented a half-assed solution myself using scripts. It works mainly because my setup is fairly fixed so I just fire everything up and fix any differences manually if needed.
NeWS used to have a way to record an event stream and play it back later, so you could record a start-up event stream to play from ~/.startup.ps when you ran the NeWS server, that would pop up menus and open windows, start apps, position them on the screen, type stuff into them, click on buttons, etc.
You had to be careful and not record setting up your desktop too fast, but then it worked pretty well! I would open up terminals on a bunch of different servers, start emacs in shell windows, set up my initial emacs shell window, etc. I'd just go take a dump and get some coffee while NeWS warmed up.
That was the best you could do in 1986, since none of the Unix programs or gui apps at that time had any idea about how to save and restore their state, and there wasn't a standard desktop framework (except what NeWS provided, which was hardly a standard).
I'm disappointed that 35 years later all window systems don't come with a standard built-in event recording and playback (and even editing) feature you can use to set up your desktop or execute repetitive tasks. Like visual Emacs keyboard macros.
> Besides starting up fast, another important value standby modes add is freeing you from having to open, position and initialize (open the documents/locations in them) all your apps manually every time.
Your last point is why I use hibernate. The actual boot time is barely noticeable on new laptops but even if I remember what I was doing when I hibernated it, which is rare, it still takes a while to get all my terminal windows back and everything where it was.
My XPS 9560 has woken up from sleep randomly more times than I can count. It's sometimes happened in my backpack and always gets stupid hot. There is a definite issue here.
Funny enough, I actually had a plenty of issues with XPS and Linux. The machine would not go to sleep when I closed the lid and put it in the bag. The result - an extremely hot and loud laptop. I think that may have been a BIOS issue, as it stopped happening after a year or so.
Often it's a problem with the Linux ACPI settings. I had to write a script that checks entries in /proc/acpi/wakeup and disables them as the laptop will otherwise often immediately come back from sleep due to being woken by the ethernet card or another device. That's not specific to Dell devices. Otherwise checking syslog often reveals why going to sleep failed, sometimes it's a particular program that refuses to freeze.
Here's the script btw for those that have the same problem, you'll need to modify the identifiers based on your hardware after identifying which devices cause the problem
The thing is, XPS laptop have issues going to S3 Sleep/Modern Standby. There are many threads about battery draining due to this.
The question is, why isn't the laptop shutting down properly when it begins to overheat inside a bag? In any case, this will probably not void the warranty in most countries.
XPS15 owner here. Had this exact problem during the first year of ownership. Somehow Windows updates changed this behavior and I haven't had any more battery draining / overheating in bag since. But I will not buy Dell again. Too many little problems. I haven't had ONE problem of this kind with ThinkPad's, in maybe 25 years of use.
Now, it's just came an absurdly inefficient, frustrating, and wasteful experience.
I have an XPS 2-in-1. Nice machine, except for the so-so battery life and the unsupported webcam on linux, it was a good working laptop.
I paid for the biggest config at the time, and included a $300 premium guarantee with on site servicing.
One year later, the keyboard starts acting up, then the touch pad.
I contacted their support, and while the people on the phone were polite and competent (!), their ludicrous booking system to get a person on site to change my keyboard was a nightmare.
Took me a month of frustrating cat and mouse game to finally get someone at my door.
They changed my keyboard (and for some reason my speakers and battery O_o), routine stuff. "No need to do a backup for that", they said.
Took them 3 hours. They were operating blind, no manual, no spec, no pictures taken before removing parts.
Of course, once done, the machine would not boot anymore. Also the touch pad stopped working completely (tested in the UEFI).
They let me with an unusable machine and left. This was my main working machine. Thankfully, I haven't listen to them and did my homework, I had 2 full data backup and a fallback laptop, albeit way less appropriate for my freelancing missions.
One month and dozens of phone calls+emails later, they come back. Change the whole thing again. Machine is still FUBAR.
They leave again.
2 weeks later, support contacted me to offer me an exchange with a brand new laptop (remember, I didn't need a backup). They should take an appointment in 48 hours.
I'm still waiting as of today, no appointment email, a broken laptop, doing work on a machine were I have to kill the browser regularly because it swaps, doing web dev.
All the staff were nice, but their process, boy, their process sucks.
The worst thing is, it's probably made to avoid some kind of abuse of the system or to save money, but they spent to much time with me they wasted tons of cash, and end up replacing my machine anyway.
Everybody loose with a service like that.
If people are still wondering why the framework laptop is appealing, there it is. I know what my next machine will be now.
> I contacted their support, and while the people on the phone were polite and competent (!)
I contacted Dell support recently when my new laptop didn't send an image to my (Dell) external monitor.
The support guy asked me what cable I was using. It's DisplayPort on the monitor end and Thunderbolt USB-C on the laptop end. It works with the Dell laptop the recent one replaced.
The support guy proceeded to look up the new laptop's product page on Dell's public website, see language saying that for the Thunderbolt port to work with DisplayPort, you need to buy an adapter, and recommend that I buy a USB-C to MiniDP adapter. It was left unexplained how I would plug my USB-C Thunderbolt cable into the MiniDP adapter.
I wouldn't trust Dell support to know how to put on pants.
Oh, come on, sleep and hibernation are the "shut down" of a laptop nowadays, you close the lid and shove it into the bag. Its just as absurd as saying you cant put the phone in your pocket unless you fully turn it off.
Amusing to see all the armchair experts denying this. Now take your iPhone, start the Settings app, go to General/Legal & Regulatory/RF exposure and read the text.
You’re not supposed to keep your phone directly against your skin.
there is truth to this. This is the scientist who's responsible for getting smoking banned from planes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwyDCHf5iCY -- this obviously hasn't gotten airtime because it's not good for the entire phone industry and supply chain
If the laptop cannot be carried with the sleep/hibernate/standby, then it does not have a functioning sleep/hibernate/standby and is not fit for use as a laptop, so it was sold as defective and should be replaced with a working laptop at the manufacturer's expense.
That's just misconfigured then. The system sends a signal to the OS. The OS is then free to do whatever. If you have configured to screenlock then it will screenlock.
Yeah windows boot (realistically, wakeup too) has become ridiculously time-consuming on the few desktops I maintain that have to be windows. If I hadn't already switched everything else I control to Linux, boot time itself would be enough to motivate that.
Reminds me of the push a while back to rebrand laptops as "notebooks" - because many laptops (esp Dell XPS) are not built with a strong enough backbone to keep their own weight from sagging in the middle, and because they get hot enough to cause damage to legs.
I have had an XPS since 2017, it had everything I wanted (I thought) - but I seriously regretted the decision almost immediately. High-intensity tasks (gaming, TDD, etc) would cause it to conk out from overheating because they hadn't configured the bios correctly - spent hours with various levels of Dell support trying to get it fixed, with them installing various combinations of different versions of the bios firmware. The GPU setup wasn't quite as straightforward as it could have been (which isn't really Dell's problem I guess - if I was running windows, it might not have been a problem at all)
Nowadays, the base of the laptop has bowed, causing the trackpad to unglue and jut out at an angle. I have a massive mark on my screen where I once tried to shut my laptop normally - I still have to take it places, and to do that I sandwich a piece of polystyrene in it to protect the screen. I hope this is warped due to heat and not the battery bowing, but I'm burying my head in the sand on that one. And yes, I have to shut it down every time I transport it.
Thankfully, once I have the funds available, I know what laptop I'm getting next. And it won't be a dell.
If was certainly the norm for laptops in the €500-700 range from the late 00s to at least a few years ago. Happened to the Acer laptop I used in my college days
Older Siemens-Fujitsu ones did, too. Consumer grade ones, so. The main reason I went to the "professional" ones over a decade ago. Hell, who doesn't carry around his open laptop on one corner from time to time?
I had the exact same issue (base of the laptop bowing because the battery is swollen, the trackpad was almost coming out) : it's actually pretty straightforward to replace the battery yourself.
Unscrew something like 8 standard screw, replace the battery, rescrew.
> the push a while back to rebrand laptops as "notebooks" - because many laptops (esp Dell XPS) are not built with a strong enough backbone to keep their own weight from sagging in the middle, and because they get hot enough to cause damage to legs.
This wasn't a rebranding, it was a category of laptop. Cheap, small, and light, designed for people who intended to offload many local functions to the cloud. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook
Faded away as a term once this became the default thing to do.
Afraid Netbook and Notebook are two very different categories.
Had a couple of netbooks in my time, they were pretty good for what they were.
But no, I'm talking about full-blown 15-17 inch laptops that were so poorly built that if you tried to rest them on your lap, the trackpad would stop working, or keys on the keyboard would randomly press, and repeated lap-use would make it worse over time.
I have an XPS 9500 and have found this infuriating.
I think there's two separate things going on:
As others have noted, S3 sleep isn't supported, only S1 "sleep to idle" sleep. But I don't think this is the direct cause of the overheating. In S1 sleep, the laptop can average something like 900mW of power usage, which is enough to annoyingly knock a few percent off your battery overnight, but not enough to make the laptop warm, even in a bag.
The seems to be a second problem, specific to Windows, that when in S1 sleep sometimes the power consumption is high (of order 10W), and this causes the laptop to get very hot if not well ventilated. I've never been able to figure out if this Windows actually doing something useful in "modern standby" like Windows Update, or whether it's a bug. Edit: And I should add, it's crazy that there's not a way to disable this if it is doing something "useful".
Either way, under Linux the latter doesn't happen, and the laptop sleeps very cool ... just with the annoying "lose 5% of your battery overnight" problem from sleeping in S1.
Looking to update an older XPS. Seriously considering a framework, but might just buy a desktop considering I spend 90% of real dev work in the same spot with a 4K.
There is a difference between T440 and T440s. T440s is already power optimized and runs integrated GPU vs T440 which is more normal laptop with discrete graphics.
I used mostly powertop but this is less reliable source of information when you are running discrete graphics card.
As an i7, is it quad core? I had a T440p with i7-4700MQ and it had terrible power consumption compared to prior and later Thinkpads I have experienced.
What I saw in powertop was that it never got into the better "package" power states. The cores could all be spending 90%+ of the time in C7 but the package as a whole was in C2 or worse. I never found a way to fix this.
Mine had the NVIDIA GPU as well as Intel iGPU, and I primarily used it with the iGPU. The NVIDIA was of the sort that was not connected to a physical output, so it supposedly could be powered down when not being used. I had no way to truly verify this, of course.
On my T440p, the Intel and NVIDIA GPUs would show up via 'lspci'. I don't recall whether there were any BIOS options other than internal vs external display during POST/boot.
I run Ubuntu on a X1 Extreme Gen 2 for a while now, no problems whatsoever. The discrete nVidia GPU is as power hungry, and running as hot during gaming, as it did under Windows (so nether a big surprise nor a real problem, anyone remember how harsh Battletech was on GPUs initially?). Battery live, depending on use (and excluding gaming) is around 4 hours (didn't have less then 3+).
The heat issue is mitigated somewhat by putting the machine on some kind of stand to have air pass underneath it. That being said, even under Windows the machine went to sleep just fine, also woke up again. If anything, that works better now under Linux.
I hate it too. I’m not just saying that, I ran Linux as my only desktop for 3 years and exclusively AOSP phones for over 4.
Ultimately, however, some of us have stuff to do and can’t spend our entire time tinkering to maintain basic functionality. There are only so many hours in a day.
Agreed. Every time I tried windows it was the same set of frustrating behaviors. Linux helps but needs some tinkering. My first step on a new laptop would be to wipe clean and install Linux.
My wife had a similar problem with her XPS-15. Randomly during the night the laptop would warm up and cause the fans to spin up. Apparently this is caused by windows waking up. Initially I thought it was windows deciding to do an update, but even disabling that (if it is possible at all), the laptop would wakeup. Random trailing through the internet pointed to the useless Killer network drivers, or better the management application, to be the cause and uninstalling them was supposed to fix the issue. Anecdotally it seemed to have worked, but when I last checked the drivers seemed to be back.
I have the same problem on my new Thinkpad. I found a setting in the BIOS for Linux mode and that seems to have fixed the problem for now Windows has S3 available again. If I switch it to Windows mode, then modern sleep prevails and the fans run all the time.
I have an XPS 9500 under Linux (this is a >$4000 machine), no amount of fiddling with BIOS settings (which are few) or systemd/GNOME settings will make it work reliably:
- short suspend time (it can't really stay overnight when suspended with a full battery)
- sometimes it wakes up and overheats in the bag
- very short battery duration when unplugged
Apparently I'm not alone, and even under Windows it's a generalized problem; and when you look for solution on Dell's forum you find this FAQ, which tend to say XPS are more foldable desktops than real laptops.
I've tried that and while the laptop sleeps, I wasn't able to get it to wake up again. Which of course undermines the utility of it sleeping quite a bit :-) I didn't persist too much with it, so it's quite possible that one can make it work ... but from what I read when I was trying it, it might well be the case that BIOS support for S3 sleep just isn't there.
I have an high-end XPS 13 from 2020 (9310), allegedly with native Linux support, and have the exact same issues.
My previous XPS 13 from 2016 was suspending properly but now I cannot suspend my "laptop" for more than a day (it will die) or store it in a bag (it will become lava). Hibernate does not work either.
I'm learning with this thread that it also happens on Windows and I'm struggling to understand how Dell could decide to sell "laptops" at this price and not test one of the most basic features of a laptop.
I'm still rocking mine from 2016. It's been a stellar little linux laptop. Hopefully this gets sorted before I have to upgrade but I'm really good at stretching hardware on linux.
There is something OS specific: Windows has some setting to wake up when a WLAN connection is available. I had this issue once, that I hibernated it, put it in a bag and went home. On the way it must have picked up some WLAN somewhere and have turned on, while in my bag, while the lid is closed, while hibernated ... And I believe this was the standard setting. I mean, who in their right mind wants their laptop to turn on, when the lid is even closed only, because they are in range of some WLAN? What a silly setting. This has probably fried many machines and also probably their owners still do not know, that Windows was the culprit, not their hardware. Fortunately my way home was not long at that time, so the overheating was avoided in time multiple times, until I figured out what was going on. Well, now I do not use Windows any longer, except rarely, so no such issues.
You can disable network connected standby with group policy. I did try that when running Windows on my machine, and it didn't improve the randomly-getting-hot-when-asleep for me.
Generally speaking - GP GUI is just a front end for making changes to the registry for local group policies. You can find the mappings and make the registry setting changes yourself.
Windows keeps waking up for random things, the problem is getting worse with every Windows release and Microsoft keeps removing more and more controls.
Just a few days ago I spent hours trying to fix the constant wake-ups. This time it was a waketimer set by the StartMenuExperienceHost.exe process! [1]
Microsoft already removed the Power Management tabs in Device Manager for most devices (mouse, etc.). They also removed the "Allow wake timers" option in Power Options (Surface pro has very limited power options exposed). They also removed the CSEnabled registry key.
I noticed that it wakes from sleep for windows updates now, which not only is annoying (Bluetooth devices suddenly waking up too), but windows update often requires intense CPU usage as defender does its dirty things, .net re-JITs, etc.
In the US at least, laptops with LI-ion batteries are not supposed to be in the cargo hold.
I don't know whether the checked-luggage scanners catch this or what happens if they find a laptop in luggage.
The passenger isn't present during checked luggage scanning so it would be complicated to try to give the laptop to the passenger. The obvious alternatives look like theft and are extremely inconvenient. (Oh joy, I'm at my destination and my laptop isn't.)
Same in Europe. No idea what they do either. I've only put a laptop in my checked luggage once, in 2000 when it was still permitted. It was one with NiMH cells by the way which don't have a tendency to catch fire but they suck in other ways (energy density, memory effect). That's why nobody uses them anymore.
It arrived with a cracked screen so never again...
> Windows keeps waking up for random things, the problem is getting worse with every Windows release
I resorted to removing the power plug from the PC every evening after it kept turning itself on during the night semi-randomly. It was in "suspend to disk" mode, whatever that is in more technical power-save jargon terms, not just "suspend-to-ram".
I spent a significant amount of time going through Windows event logs to find what caused the wake-ups, fixed some, others were too broad to do anything about it. The settings are useless. So is the Microsoft help forum. I won't even try to ask Dell (Dell 8500 PC), they are only good at sending replacement hardware but unable to answer anything related to software (as long as they do the former I came to accept the latter).
I too had my (also Dell) laptop overheat after I had suspended it, thinking it was turned off. It was very hot when I took it out of the bag later, fortunately it was just in time. It seems this mishap caught a lot of people off guard.
What REALLY pisses me off is that if I put my computer to sleep for the night, and windows then runs some updates, it doesn't put the computer back to sleep! Why not? Why should it run all night instead of going back to sleep, what the hell microsoft
I've seen the same behavior on a 10+y.o. system with Win11 on it. I started unplugging it every night and re-plugging it every day when I went to use it.
Funny thing has happened in the meantime, since getting a MB Air I haven't plugged it in for like 2 months now...
> I resorted to removing the power plug from the PC every evening after it kept turning itself on during the night semi-randomly. It was in "suspend to disk" mode, whatever that is in more technical power-save jargon terms, not just "suspend-to-ram".
In "Suspend to RAM", the RAM is kept powered when the computer is shut down, and thus doesn't have to be touched on wake, but it means the computer has to stay powered the whole time.
In "Suspend to disk", the entire RAM is written to disk (which can take some time especially with an HDD) then the computer shuts down entirely, on wake the OS will restore RAM from disk before resuming. The need to read data back from disk to RAM makes the wake costlier, but because everything's on disk the computer can be completely shutdown.
The two can be combined into mode where data is written to disk (making going to sleep slower) then the computer enters "suspend to RAM" mode. If the computer is resumed normally it is restored from RAM, but if the computers suffers power loss it's restored from disk. Either way the computer doesn't have to boot from scratch and all the working set should be recovered. IIRC it's the default behaviour for macOS laptops, microsoft calls it "hybrid sleep".
Mine will wake the screen and make "device connected" and "device disconnected" sounds while the computer isn't sleeping, regularly. Besides being annoying (I eventually disabled those specific sounds), it probably meaningfully hurts the lifespan of my monitors to power cycle them every five freakin' minutes.
I've never been able to figure out what exactly is happening here, trawling through event logs and such (I'm no Windows guru nor do I want to be).
At this point, in my particular case, Linux actually feels more "hardware compatible" than Windows. It can keep the monitors off.
I really wish Windows was good enough to not raise my blood with things like this, because sometimes you just need to use it.
My previous PC would wake up every night around 1am and I could never figure out why. I disabled every single wake timer, all kinds of wake permissions on devices, yet it would always wake up in the middle of the night. The power event in pc management only said "woken by: unknown source".
I do some support work for a friend and his kid's school laptops.
All Lenovo/Win 10.
He complained about the same thing, in this case on laptops that were completely shutdown the night before. In the end we tracked it down to the Lenovo Vantage service.
I assume it was powering on the laptop to check for updates but I could find no log or record of it doing so. But, once we removed that software the issue went away completely.
Anecdotal I know and I even told him it could be something else, that removing the software may have changed something related but not from Lenovo, etc. But in the end, a few weeks later that is, he confirmed that since we did that, they did not have the problem again.
Hardware manufacturers could pressure Microsoft to stop doing this. I hope there will soon be legal action prompting the manufacturers to take action (perhaps a class action against Dell by people who have been denied warranty on this basis? - though in the USA at least, Dell probably has that blocked by arbitration clauses.)
For desktops at least, Wake on LAN is still a setting in EFI/BIOS. On my AMD desktop using a high end ASUS motherboard (Dark Hero), I switched that off along with a couple things that looked like a WoL setting in Windows, and that PC has stayed asleep all night ever since.
I haven't seen this behavior from my ThinkPad X1 Nano, but that may be because it shuts itself down entirely after being closed for an hour or two without being connected to a power source.
Something seems a bit off with your numbers. If you're losing 5% of your battery "overnight" (at least 8 hours I assume), and you have the larger 86Wh battery, that implies a discharge rate of only 537mW.
900mw - nearly a whole watt - seems very high! Easily enough to cause noticeable warming - a running modern laptop at idle only uses 3-6 watts.
It's something about modern standby. I have a laptop with a 10th Gen i7. I put it in my bag once and when I pulled it out after my trip, the fans were running at full blast and the laptop was extremely hot. I'm also fairly sure it damaged the fan because it's never been able to run at higher speeds ever since.
I'm also not sure if it's a bug or something else. I do feel like there's something problematic about modern standby. I didn't have this issue under Linux, which actually does standby properly.
I've seen issues with Modern Standby on my fleet of Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga L13 and L13 Gen 2. Usually everything is fine, but sometimes they get super hot in standby as well. It's like something is keeping the CPU awake but the rest of the hardware is asleep (including the fans). My older units (ThinkPad Yoga 260, ThinkPad Yoga 370, ThinkPad L380 Yoga, ThinkPad L390 Yoga) never had any problem like this because they don't support Modern Standby.
It's very annoying that MS doesn't allow us any way to disable Modern Standby. OEMs still haven't figured out how to make old school sleep perfectly reliable. Springing a new standby model on them was doomed to be just troublesome.
Modern Standby is an Intel thing, not a Microsoft thing. Intel has just pressured Microsoft and other OEMs into supporting it. IMO, it's a huge steaming pile-o-crap, and one of the biggest reasons I want my next PC to have a non-Intel CPU. Intel has shown over the past decade that they are quite simply incapable of implementing properly functioning power management, and I'm tired of having machines die because of their stupidity.
I've had two Surface Pro 4's (one of the first "Modern Sleep" devices) develop battery bloat because of this Intel's power mgt incompetence. Microsoft replaced both, but what is this crap costing all of us, both in higher hardware prices and environmental waste?
FWIW, I haven't needed a faster CPU in years - I need more RAM, long, long battery life, and sleep/wake that always works, instantly. If the iPad were capable of being a real computer, it might get me back into the Apple fold, if iOS had a usable UI...
FWIW, it is not an Intel thing. I got an Asus G14 2021 which has nothing Intel (Amd CPU and nvidia GPU) and this does not support S3, only the modern "connected standby" crap.
Talk about ruining a perfectly working solution for almost no gain.
Not sure if this is related, but I have a 2021 Legion 5 Pro, and even fully powered down it seems to lose a lot of battery power overnight. (Maybe 5%-10% charge, IIRC?)
And this is even after changing the BIOS setting so that it's always-on USB port isn't always on.
I'm really curious where the power is going. Or if the supplied battery has internal leakage issues.
>I've never been able to figure out if this Windows actually doing something useful in "modern standby" like Windows Update, or whether it's a bug.
I asked a very similar question a few months ago. The sleep/standby modes were behaving as other people have reported, however, the fact that the battery was draining rapidly in shutdown mode, on a new Dell with a 3 month-old battery with very few cycles, was a cause for concern. Nevertheless, I tried using the CsEnabled trick, which didn't work. Eventually, after troubleshooting BIOS features, applying the latest updates and using powercfg options -- batteryreport, sleepstudy etc.
I found a solution, which is a compromise at best. The battery drain was 20% within a few hours. But now with S3 sleep state -- it drains around 8-10% in full shutdown mode over a period of 8-10 hours. A similar drain in Standby is over a period of 15-18 hours.
> just with the annoying "lose 5% of your battery overnight" problem from sleeping in S1.
Just 5% would be manageable -- I probably wouldn't even notice it. It's more on the order or 20-30% for me, so if I happen to not use my laptop over the weekend, I'll come back to a completely dead laptop.
A couple times, I've opened the laptop to have it scream at me to plug it in ASAP.
It's frustrating when you put a completely charged laptop to bed and can't get going without having to hunt for a power cord.
Serious question — why do people so frequently sleep rather than shut down? Is it to save time on booting up? Is it because you want other processes running? All of the pain points below are reasons why I just always shut down. I think I developed the habit at a time when sleep just never worked on my linux machine though, but that was years ago now. I’m speechless reading below that Windows wakes just to install updates… and then remains awake!
I prefer to put my computer to sleep rather than shut it down. Closing the lid on my computer, putting it in my backpack, and heading home for the day is very natural. When I get back to work the next day, I open it up connect the cables, scan my fingerprint, and everything's back where I left it. I usually go at least a month between reboots, but that's highly dependant on when updates come out (and get approved by work, of course).
This is on a Mac though, so (for me anyway) this is something that just works without any fuss.
As a slight aside, I prefer to shut down and be sure that things are shut down. It really bothered me when Mac laptops started turning on just because the lid was open.
It makes it impossible to confirm the laptop is truly off, because opening it to check turns it on. This was especially annoying during my "boarding a plane" ritual where I check everything is right before settling in.
And on a Mac it works either way, as you will get almost all of your context back even if you shut down rather than sleep. Windows still seems to start up as a blank slate, unless I’m missing a setting somewhere.
These days, Windows will try to recover your context, but the implementation (like many other modern features like display scaling) is dependent on the app. As far as I've been able to tell, roughly most Microsoft and Electron apps will recover their states on reboot; most other apps won't.
Like a sibling commenter, I've found this pretty hit-and-miss too.
Something like Outlook or OneNote will restore its state reasonably well, as will Safari/Chrome/Edge/Firefox. Others, like Activity Monitor, Enpass, and iTerm2, decide to "helpfully" open a window for me even though the previous state was "running with no windows open" (which is perfectly valid for many applications).
> Serious question — why do people so frequently sleep rather than shut down?
So we can right back in the context we had? Who wants to spend the first 15 minutes digging out Jira, the issue you worked on, the two related ones, start IntelliJ, digging out the correct screenshots etc etc.
... or even: who wants to stop debugging and turn of the computer just because we are leaving the office to catch the train?
I first learned this on a 486/66 DX2 IBM aptiva desktop in 1995.
I've too had times when it didn't work on Linux but today boil-in-bag seems to be a Windows feature, not supported out of the box on ordinary Linux distros on mainstream hardware ;-)
Yes. I agree. It seems to be getting harder to set up hibernate as an option. Regular (non HN) users might not even figure out that hibernate is a possibility. But it definitely is a better option than sleep.
> But it definitely is a better option than sleep.
It's the better option if you don't mind the longer time waking up, since RAM has to be restored from disk.
Otherwise, sleep should be backed by hibernation on all machines (it certainly is on mac laptops, and I think it is on windows as well): in case of power loss during sleep, the machine falls back to waking from hibernation, but if there was no power loss it wakes way faster. This is especially useful for people who move around a lot during the day and will close the laptop, move around, and reopen it. While things have gotten better with modern SSDs, having to restore 16 to 32GB from disk to RAM is far from instant-on.
Sure, but it definitely avoids a bunch of the problems mentioned in this thread. It's annoying that you have to dig so hard to even make Hibernate visible next to Sleep, Shutdown, and Reboot on the various power menus.
I recently switched from an XPS 15 to an M1 MacBook Pro, and it's glorious that I just don't have to think about it anymore. The XPS 15 had all the problems I'm reading above, and then some.
Macs do this. They hibernate to RAM and after about 1 hour (configurable with pmset I think) they wake up momentarily to hibernate to SSD.
The reason they don't write the hibernate image straight away and just power down after an hour is to eliminate writes to the SSD but I believe you can set that wait to 0.
I don’t choose to sleep or shutdown. I want instant context saving and I will close my laptop many times a day. I expect opening it to restore me to where I was within 5 seconds with same application state and windows in the same place.
I have a MacBook which performs this flawlessly and my Linux desktop also pauses and restores flawlessly except immediately after installing new Nvidia GPU drivers.
I haven’t thought about different CPU sleep stages in approximately 9 years when I had to make my XPS M1330 handle them in the end years of its life.
> I think I developed the habit at a time when sleep just never worked on my linux machine though
I did the same in my ~15 years of Windows & Linux desktops and laptops, with the sole exception of an IBM (yep, was still IBM) Thinkpad on which suspend to disk would magically Just Work on Linux if you created a partition at the correct location, with the correct size, and with the correct type ID. The BIOS handled it somehow, I think, which seems crazy but it did work flawlessly. IIRC I didn't even have to tell Linux about it, and I ran Gentoo at the time so I doubt it was doing anything for me automatically.
Switching to Mac a little over a decade ago broke me of the habit, eventually. It was one of many coping behaviors I didn't need anymore and had to un-learn. Unfortunately, now that I'm used to shit actually working semi-correctly a fair amount of the time (to be clear, Mac is far from perfect, everything else is just so much worse that it's like no-one else is even trying) without my having to spend time forcing it to work, it's hard to go back.
People who use Macs have been just closing and opening their computers for about a decade and not thinking about it.
The wifi is still connected, the ssh session I was in is still connected... The tests I was running when the doorbell rang... they pick up where they left off. It's nice.
It's stuff like this that keeps me begrudgingly coming back to Apple for laptops.
> People who use Macs have been just closing and opening their computers for about a decade and not thinking about it.
Yes and no. There have been weird issues where the machine wakes but the screen stays dark and another where externally connected monitors won’t necessarily work on wake. Possibly some of this is connected fo the hell which is the dongle lifestyle.
Apple seems to have come out the other side of these issues with recent laptops/OS releases (last 18 months).
Primary reason: I need to type a 16-character bitclocker password and then a 16-character Windows password after shutdown. But with all those sleep and overheating issues that's what I do now.
(The above requires the package 'sysfsutils' to be installed on Debian / Debian derived distributions).
On my work supplied xps-13, bluetooth does not survive the laptop being unplugged in "deep" sleep (even for a couple seconds). Fixing bluetooth requires suspend to disk aka "hibernate" or regular reboot to restore. No reloading modules etc. helps. Other than that annoying bug, proper sleep works fine on the hardware.
But, I also had to add,
/etc/modprobe.d/i915gpu-fix-xps13-crashes.conf:
To solve the laptop crashing when idle. Originally I disabled c-states on the gpu to fix the crashing, but some other kind soul on the Internet shared the above which solves the crashing, but doesn't kill battery life like my fix.
"Modern Standby" is such a crock of shit. As far as anyone knows, it doesn't do anything useful, but it consumes FIFTY PERCENT (50%!) of the battery each night.
Luckily you can turn it off, at least in Linux, and then the machine functions more-or-less normally.
I was going to post the exact same thing. I have the 9500; this definitely infuriated me and is mostly solved by installing Linux.
There are still some things that can annoyingly wake it (usually a bluetooth device trying to pair to it); but it's an odd exception versus the 50% chance every time I went to transport my laptop with Windows.
You can force modern standby to disconnect from networks (connected standby vs. disconnected standby). This helps with stopping the system from waking up randomly.
That's because they know how shitty is sleep function really. Ok, laptop is in a sleep mode successfully. But doing anything to it or even looking at it funny will immediately wake it. Moving mouse, switching off mouse, inserting or removing mouse dongle, inserting or removing headphones and so on.
I simply stopped using sleep mode altogether.
> Ok, laptop is in a sleep mode successfully. But doing anything to it or even looking at it funny will immediately wake it.
The XPS that I recently replaced had to be closed at night, which annoyed me every day. If left open, it would detect that it was idle and shut off the display. Except that that only worked on the laptop screen. The external monitor would go through a permanent cycle of shutting off, waking up, displaying a "no signal" message, shutting off, waking up...
This doesn't happen with other laptops on the same monitor. Something was broken pretty badly.
So if I understand it correctly, you have to manually shut down these laptops if you want to travel/commute with them and reboot them again when you want to use them, and they call that "MODERN" standby? And not even an option to change it?
Are they planning to keep that obviously broken behavior as the forum post seems to imply, or they will fix it?
Did anyone else notice that the cookie popup on this Dell page had the option to "declinate all cookies"? I did a double take to see if this was a real Dell page based on that.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 515 ms ] thread> Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The PC will overheat as a result of that action. Any resulting damage will not be covered by the Dell warranty.
Now how a hibernated laptop could overheat..
The article should explicitly state…
> Under no circumstances should you leave a Windows laptop in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag
…because other, more competent, manufacturers have figured this out. Windows and their OEMs simply suck, there is no sugarcoating it.
What they actually say: "Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The PC will overheat as a result of that action. Any resulting damage will not be covered by the Dell warranty."
Fair enough. A laptop that overheats because it's been left in an enclosed space whilst not off is not damage caused by a fault of the device.
Microsoft seems to have decided to entirely break this expectation such that closing the lid of a laptop puts it into this weird not-really-suspended state, such that putting it in a confined space could cause it to overheat. It's... pretty user-unfriendly and IMO stupid.
Ultimately the company selling to the end user has to stand over the package they're selling.
Closing the lid does not necessarily turn the laptop off at all (by design). I think most people have had that experience. In fact the lid may be closed with the laptop fully on.
In any case, they make is explicit and clear exactly to avoid any such assumption.
The title is obviously clickbait because of course you can put your Dell laptop in a bag and of course that does not void the warranty.
Weird that you're angrier about a headline than a warranty being voided by putting a laptop in a bag.
Or in other words, from the perspective of the hardware, what is about to happen once somebody closes the lid?
The fault lies with Microsoft, mismanaging the user expectations about shutting down the computer.
The computer should absolutely not wake up from sleep to do things, if the result could be that it overheats. It's like saying people shouldn't pocket their smartphones.
Come to think of it, they were Dells. Perhaps some switch is not properly debounced or something.
You might want to check the event viewer in cases like that.
Sometimes caused by drivers or periphery. Good luck disabling them all.
No idea how modern sleep plays into this. The Linux hibernate turns the system off for real (battery can be removed).
The last time I turned it of, I removed the battery. It is pretty silly that my laptop in 2021 can't do what my first laptop could do in 2003. Even worse, it is a Thinkpad. I expect better from those.
Fortunately I've been running Linux on my XPS 13, which I have put into a bag hundreds of times (maybe even over a thousand) while suspended. Linux's suspend does actually use the "cold" S3 suspend state, so this is safe.
[0] It's called "Modern Standby" (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...), which... honestly sounds really stupid to me. "Modern Standby" presumably drains the battery orders of magnitude faster than a normal S3 standby. I can't imagine ever wanting this behavior. I'm entirely fine with my laptop taking ~10 seconds to wake up and reconnect to whatever network I'm near.
>Switching between S3 and Modern Standby cannot be done by changing a setting in the BIOS. Switching the power model is not supported in Windows without a complete OS re-install.
and on Reddit
>Warning: if your laptop is newer than 2019, there is a high chance, your OEM removed any S3 code from the bios, and your laptop will crash entering S3 and you have to force hold power key to restart and then delete the registry entry again to revert back to modern standby.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/h0r56s/getting_back_s...
so not only is microsoft screwing around.. its getting all the manufacturers to screw around as well?
The irony is that I have a 4 years old XPS 13 where everything works like a charm, even under Linux. Talk about progress ...
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000125880/how-to-re...
I have a 2017 XPS model so I the firmware supports S3 sleep. There is no modal in the BIOS though. I had to trick windows into thinking it didn't support modern sleep.
Based on posts from others trying to do the same thing, it used to be a single registery key edit. Now it's convoluted and required fiddling with WiFi power controls. The end result it sleeps properly but takes anywhere from 10 seconds (good) to more than a minute (bad) to connect to WiFi when woken up.
Of course on Linux it just works.
Back when I was looking into this I found someone who'd found a way to patch the acpi table to enable it for the newer models (at risk of bricking the device entirely). Alas I can't find the link any more.
I won't buy another Dell until this is fixed.
My work laptop is an X1 carbon and it supports only S3 sleep so it just works.
That's absolutely insane.
I don't think it's the OEMs / manufacturers, it's Intel.
On my side I am quite happy that the hardware+software can support some kind of fast wake-up (similar to Macbooks and smartphones instead of needing >10 seconds to wake up when I open the lid). I just do a real shutdown when I don't need the laptop anymore.
And precisely : as it was said by someone else above, on modern computers with SSDs, I would rather disable "fast startup" so that the computer really shutdowns when I ask him to (which is also useful when you have dual-boot and your Linux systems wants to get r/w access to the NTFS partition)
But I admit that the computer could/should automatically enter in suspend-to-disk after being in "modern standby" for more than e.g. 5 minutes, and this should be configurable.
It's like Windows broke the simplest button ... just shut it down!
Probably a convenience feature for the NSA folks logged in trough the Intel ME.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211879#c24
I’m running linux kernel 5.14.3 for the QCA6390 support as my laptop is the Windows edition.
This has been a problem for already quite long. I remember my very old laptop overheating if being put in the backpack in Standby mode.
Nowadays I in fact don't just turn laptops Off the default way. I go and disable the "fast start up" (Control Panel - Power Options - Choose what the power buttons do) to make sure the computer gets turnt of for real rather than using yet another flavour of hibernation. And it still starts very fast (a couple of seconds longer perhaps) so I see no reason for these "fast start up" and "modern stand-by" modes to even exist now as we have fast SSDs and everything.
Besides starting up fast, another important value standby modes add is freeing you from having to open, position and initialize (open the documents/locations in them) all your apps manually every time. But this seems trivial to be reached by adding functions to just save the list of opened apps, their windows positions and the actual documents which were opened in them. This will require some coordinated effort from both the OS and the apps developers though.
This is one thing that usually Linux gets mostly right .. only if the proprietary GPU drivers played along. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Apple certainly could implement this properly but instead decide to release a new half-assed half-hibernation after another.
I was referring to this.
Certainly not a show-stopper, if this means not accidentally killing my €2k+ laptop because it decides to randomly wake up in my bag.
Problem is that hibernation is slooow so people don't like to use it
It's still possible to assign "hibernate" as the action taken in response to various power-related actions such as closing the lid or pressing the power button. This makes no sense; I'm not sure what's going on.
System -> Power & sleep -> Additional power settings -> Choose what the power buttons do -> Change settings that are currently unavailable -> Check Hibernate.
And then get lucky that your laptop wakes up again (mine dies 1 out of 10 times)
Edit: sorry, can't read.
"Turn on fast startup (recommended)" is checked, and that option is also disabled and can't be unchecked, despite obviously being undesirable.
My drive can write with up to 3gb/s. I only have 32 gb of ram, so the process should take at most 10s. Generally less, as a lot is usually free.
My 9-year-old SATA SSD does better than that.
i haven't encountered anyone in years that didn't have at least one in their pc/laptop, but if you dont: i strongly suggest you buy one. because writing 30 Gbyte sequentially generally does takes about 10 seconds.
not sure how that would in any way impact a hibernate routine which would very rarely have to store more then 64gb though.
I guess most people have 16 GiB RAM or less though. I'm not sure why an ~10 second wait is too long given that the user intentionally selected hibernate instead of sleep.
It isn't. It can add just some seconds (probably less than 5 on fast SSDs, even less if you don't have too much RAM). If people can't wait this little they need to have their lives / jobs / mental health fixed rather than add more orders of complexity (with according increase in problems) into the computers.
On my work laptop (modern HP Elitebook), sleep doesn't work at all (laptop just turns on again after going to sleep), so I'm using hibernate exclusively. Waking up from hibernate takes longer than one minute.
On the other hand, my private laptop (Huawei Matebook) wakes up from sleep in less than 10 seconds.
For secure boot I would guess you could have the EFI partition signed/validated with the TPM.
In my case, I use SecureBoot to check the boot image's signature (contains the kernel + initrd + boot params). Then it starts everything from an LVM that lives on top of LUKS. I always have to type in the password (never bothered to get the TPM working), but I don't see why the TPM wouldn't be able to do it.
From the system boot point of view, it just starts an OS. The OS will then proceed to load some data in RAM. It's its business whether this is "fresh" data for a new boot, or "old" data from the last boot.
As for security, the hibernation image is at risk unless you use full disk encryption. But then (last time I checked) so is the typical Linux distro because ultimately you (the end user) have complete control over the OS. That means that at some point the kernel has to load and run privileged code that was never signed by some central authority. The only alternative to this would be sending all drivers to be signed by someone else, even those you built yourself from source.
tl;dr You can in fact use hibernation if you set it up, even with secure boot. Doing so is not a security issue. Lack of full disk encryption is always a security issue if physical access is an attack vector you are concerned about.
Now that batteries are decent and S3 on Linux is good, I don’t bother with anything else. I reboot/power off my machines on a regular basis to make sure the things I need persisted are, in fact, persisted and everything will be brought up again.
So I was quite surprised to find resume= pointing to my swap partition in my /proc/cmdline after a default install.
I have Arch configured to hibernate on lid close, and it's only about 8 seconds from lid open to a working login.
It also means I don't lose 5%-20% of my battery each night.
My solution was to reach around to the back of the tower and cycle the PSU power switch after hibernating the PC, every time.
“Full” hibernation is still there, it’s just disabled by default in the UI but not on the OS level.
There’s also this “hybrid sleep” concept introduced since Vista where an OS would go from Sleep state to Hibernate automatically after 180 minutes of Sleep (IIRC, also can be overridden by the OEM) to save the laptop battery further since after the laptop hibernates it’s effectively off.
It’s really confusing and a hell to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. I think Microsoft was trying to apply smart decisions on the OS level _for_ the user but there’s no real indication of what’s actually happening with the system. The naming doesn’t help either, especially after “Modern Sleep” has been introduced.
EDIT: I decided to check myself because I wasn’t sure and it turns out I was indeed wrong. “Hybrid Sleep” is actually about a device going to Sleep and Hibernate simultaneously - it’s so that you can still resume from the hibernated image on the disk in case battery dies while in Sleep. At the same time, you can resume from Sleep right away even before parallel hibernation is finished. I think the intention is that you kinda get the best of both worlds here.
The behavior of going to sleep to hibernate after some time which I’ve described originally is actually something that was there since at least Windows XP.
For support staff, and for hardware & OS vendors, dealing with customers complaining about hibernation or S3 sleep not working those states were so infuriating and definitely NOT a solved problem.
Example failure modes: — Doesn't wake when told. — Immediately wakes instead of staying in low power state. — Performs a cold boot when trying to wake. — OS disables desired state with no explanation. — OS disables desired state which has worked perfectly on that machine for month/years, and OS claims it has been disabled because it is not compatible.
(I admit I haven't used systems with broken hibernates, or at least not any where a little it of troubleshooting could get it working, so that may skew my perception of it.)
I killed a macbook air exactly like this. It just decided not to shutdown like usual.
Usually I'd put it on sleep mode, or just close the lid and it is fine, but it only took one time for it not to work properly to find the insides of my backpack like a sauna.
This happened once or twice with Windows laptops for me (Lenovo and Asus); but each time the laptop survived. Was yours a fanless model?
Traditional hard disks are the biggest exception, but I'm fairly certain that's not a worry for a Surface.
The dumb thing is you can't choose to do sleep vs hibernate; you have a system global setting which decides what "sleep" means. (AFAIU You need to have two shell scripts sleep.sh and hibernate.sh to change the hibernate mode if you want to be in control on what's gonna happen)
It's also Macs.
Computers are complicated, some things are probably released with a tight schedule, things are not formally verified, and therefore have bugs. Hardware or software. It's sad but we have to deal with it.
Sleep has been working well on Linux on the machines I've been using for the past years (especially after removing a defective RAM stick from one of them - and the computer is built in such a way I could do it myself easily!). But yes, once or twice, the computer won't go to sleep because I'm running updates (that I launched manually, mind you), or some other shit.
I've taken the habit of checking that the computer actually went to sleep before putting it in a bag and you should, too, for the one time your Mac won't go to sleep because who knows why.
We can absolutely both meet reasonable innovation and deadlines with formal verification. It's just that no one wants to pay for it.
The most practical use of formal method I witnessed is model checking (with TLA+), but that does not check the actual implementation.
There's also CompCert, a formally verified C compiler written in Coq, but even then, some parts are not verified so the final product may still have bugs.
See my post about NeWS ~/.startup.ps event recording and playback above. You could record keyboard events to set up your terminal windows and emacs buffers and shells, and mouse events to open and position windows, pop up and select from menus, press buttons and drag sliders, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28640529
Back in the 80's we used unencrypted rlogin with .rhosts files to avoid typing passwords, but now you can restore encrypted shell connections using ssh keys.
The nice thing is that it was WYDIWYG (What You Did Is What You Get), no writing scripts in various shell and emacs scripting languages, just record and playback, like keyboard macros for the window system.
ssh connections fail even with just sleep though, obviously.
It requires two things:
- the network does not have a short timeout after which it closes the connection
- no side of the connection is trying to do I/O on this connection while one of the computers is sleeping.
Maybe it's just my (2013 Pro and M1 Air), or maybe in the meantime the quality dipped... All in all, as I often say, the best advertisement for Apple is all the other computers.
> I've taken the habit of checking that the computer actually went to sleep before putting it in a bag and you should, too, for the one time your Mac won't go to sleep because who knows why.
How would you even do that? If I open the lid (even just a bit), it turns back on immediately. Also, why do you think it would overheat if it accidentally didn't go to sleep? It's not like it's using fans while being turned on.
My computers also go to sleep reliably. They are professional hardware, of good quality, and from different brands. I'm sure other models of other brands or of the same brands have quirks, or that there are people who have problems with the same hardware/software as mine because they use it differently.
Maybe it's not that much a Mac vs the rest of the world thing. Evidence is that people have problems with any kind of hardware and brands, this is indisputable.
> How would you even do that?
There is usually some led visible somewhere, or a small noise, when the thing failed to fall asleep. You know your computer.
It is one of the main reasons I moved to Apple, it is just so much more convenient not having to worry about it.
Mind you, I've had it with an older model Macbook as well, wouldn't go to sleep properly when closed / off of power / in a bag.
I just gave up on OS and app developers and implemented a half-assed solution myself using scripts. It works mainly because my setup is fairly fixed so I just fire everything up and fix any differences manually if needed.
You had to be careful and not record setting up your desktop too fast, but then it worked pretty well! I would open up terminals on a bunch of different servers, start emacs in shell windows, set up my initial emacs shell window, etc. I'd just go take a dump and get some coffee while NeWS warmed up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
That was the best you could do in 1986, since none of the Unix programs or gui apps at that time had any idea about how to save and restore their state, and there wasn't a standard desktop framework (except what NeWS provided, which was hardly a standard).
I'm disappointed that 35 years later all window systems don't come with a standard built-in event recording and playback (and even editing) feature you can use to set up your desktop or execute repetitive tasks. Like visual Emacs keyboard macros.
Wait, Windows still doesn't do that?
It does have virtual desktops now at least.
There are third-party solutions.
MS need better window management.
Here's the script btw for those that have the same problem, you'll need to modify the identifiers based on your hardware after identifying which devices cause the problem
The question is, why isn't the laptop shutting down properly when it begins to overheat inside a bag? In any case, this will probably not void the warranty in most countries.
My P series ThinkPad does this all the time.
Warranty is something they were proud of.
Now, it's just came an absurdly inefficient, frustrating, and wasteful experience.
I have an XPS 2-in-1. Nice machine, except for the so-so battery life and the unsupported webcam on linux, it was a good working laptop.
I paid for the biggest config at the time, and included a $300 premium guarantee with on site servicing.
One year later, the keyboard starts acting up, then the touch pad.
I contacted their support, and while the people on the phone were polite and competent (!), their ludicrous booking system to get a person on site to change my keyboard was a nightmare.
Took me a month of frustrating cat and mouse game to finally get someone at my door.
They changed my keyboard (and for some reason my speakers and battery O_o), routine stuff. "No need to do a backup for that", they said.
Took them 3 hours. They were operating blind, no manual, no spec, no pictures taken before removing parts.
Of course, once done, the machine would not boot anymore. Also the touch pad stopped working completely (tested in the UEFI).
They let me with an unusable machine and left. This was my main working machine. Thankfully, I haven't listen to them and did my homework, I had 2 full data backup and a fallback laptop, albeit way less appropriate for my freelancing missions.
One month and dozens of phone calls+emails later, they come back. Change the whole thing again. Machine is still FUBAR.
They leave again.
2 weeks later, support contacted me to offer me an exchange with a brand new laptop (remember, I didn't need a backup). They should take an appointment in 48 hours.
I'm still waiting as of today, no appointment email, a broken laptop, doing work on a machine were I have to kill the browser regularly because it swaps, doing web dev.
All the staff were nice, but their process, boy, their process sucks.
The worst thing is, it's probably made to avoid some kind of abuse of the system or to save money, but they spent to much time with me they wasted tons of cash, and end up replacing my machine anyway.
Everybody loose with a service like that.
If people are still wondering why the framework laptop is appealing, there it is. I know what my next machine will be now.
I contacted Dell support recently when my new laptop didn't send an image to my (Dell) external monitor.
The support guy asked me what cable I was using. It's DisplayPort on the monitor end and Thunderbolt USB-C on the laptop end. It works with the Dell laptop the recent one replaced.
The support guy proceeded to look up the new laptop's product page on Dell's public website, see language saying that for the Thunderbolt port to work with DisplayPort, you need to buy an adapter, and recommend that I buy a USB-C to MiniDP adapter. It was left unexplained how I would plug my USB-C Thunderbolt cable into the MiniDP adapter.
I wouldn't trust Dell support to know how to put on pants.
You’re not supposed to keep your phone directly against your skin.
I always turn it off, reboot is in 2/seconds so it's no problem.
Great laptop, had it for 7 years still faster than 2020 XPS with windows.
I have had an XPS since 2017, it had everything I wanted (I thought) - but I seriously regretted the decision almost immediately. High-intensity tasks (gaming, TDD, etc) would cause it to conk out from overheating because they hadn't configured the bios correctly - spent hours with various levels of Dell support trying to get it fixed, with them installing various combinations of different versions of the bios firmware. The GPU setup wasn't quite as straightforward as it could have been (which isn't really Dell's problem I guess - if I was running windows, it might not have been a problem at all)
Nowadays, the base of the laptop has bowed, causing the trackpad to unglue and jut out at an angle. I have a massive mark on my screen where I once tried to shut my laptop normally - I still have to take it places, and to do that I sandwich a piece of polystyrene in it to protect the screen. I hope this is warped due to heat and not the battery bowing, but I'm burying my head in the sand on that one. And yes, I have to shut it down every time I transport it.
Thankfully, once I have the funds available, I know what laptop I'm getting next. And it won't be a dell.
I don't think that's coming from the laptop sagging. They're pretty rigid. I think your battery has swollen.
But fret not, it's "factory-replaceable".
There's another modern trend with what appears to be no justification.
But you do have the option if you don't want to do it yourself nor go to a repair shop
Tell me about these greener pastures!
Pretty unproven pastures, but have heard nothing but good reports. Worst thing I've seen said is the audio bass was a bit underwhelming!
Unscrew something like 8 standard screw, replace the battery, rescrew.
If you don't have any tools at home and are not sure what battery to buy : https://eustore.ifixit.com/products/dell-xps-15-9550-and-551...
This wasn't a rebranding, it was a category of laptop. Cheap, small, and light, designed for people who intended to offload many local functions to the cloud. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook
Faded away as a term once this became the default thing to do.
Had a couple of netbooks in my time, they were pretty good for what they were.
But no, I'm talking about full-blown 15-17 inch laptops that were so poorly built that if you tried to rest them on your lap, the trackpad would stop working, or keys on the keyboard would randomly press, and repeated lap-use would make it worse over time.
I think there's two separate things going on:
As others have noted, S3 sleep isn't supported, only S1 "sleep to idle" sleep. But I don't think this is the direct cause of the overheating. In S1 sleep, the laptop can average something like 900mW of power usage, which is enough to annoyingly knock a few percent off your battery overnight, but not enough to make the laptop warm, even in a bag.
The seems to be a second problem, specific to Windows, that when in S1 sleep sometimes the power consumption is high (of order 10W), and this causes the laptop to get very hot if not well ventilated. I've never been able to figure out if this Windows actually doing something useful in "modern standby" like Windows Update, or whether it's a bug. Edit: And I should add, it's crazy that there's not a way to disable this if it is doing something "useful".
Either way, under Linux the latter doesn't happen, and the laptop sleeps very cool ... just with the annoying "lose 5% of your battery overnight" problem from sleeping in S1.
If I do I'll probably buy a framework laptop.
For that reason my primary work machine can currently only be Linux. I have Windows, but this one is only for stuff that is incompatible with Linux.
I actually have Linux PC and a separate Linux laptop (Thinkpad T440s).
That laptop runs super cool once I debugged all the sources of power usage. Which is quite easy on Linux but neigh impossible on Windows.
> That laptop runs super cool once I debugged all the sources of power usage.
I have a T440 which runs quite hot, where did you look for sources of power usage (beyond powertop) ?
I used mostly powertop but this is less reliable source of information when you are running discrete graphics card.
It's basically a T440s without the touchpad. But it's got an i7, of that matters.
What I saw in powertop was that it never got into the better "package" power states. The cores could all be spending 90%+ of the time in C7 but the package as a whole was in C2 or worse. I never found a way to fix this.
Mine had the NVIDIA GPU as well as Intel iGPU, and I primarily used it with the iGPU. The NVIDIA was of the sort that was not connected to a physical output, so it supposedly could be powered down when not being used. I had no way to truly verify this, of course.
I don't get into the bios very often so I might be wrong, but I don't recall seeing any indication of an nvidia gpu in mine. I'll look better!
The heat issue is mitigated somewhat by putting the machine on some kind of stand to have air pass underneath it. That being said, even under Windows the machine went to sleep just fine, also woke up again. If anything, that works better now under Linux.
Ultimately, however, some of us have stuff to do and can’t spend our entire time tinkering to maintain basic functionality. There are only so many hours in a day.
nigh: near, nearly
2c: Had an XPS15 die the other day, won't buy another. Also sworn off Apple hardware. Using Lenovo laptop. All good.
- short suspend time (it can't really stay overnight when suspended with a full battery)
- sometimes it wakes up and overheats in the bag
- very short battery duration when unplugged
Apparently I'm not alone, and even under Windows it's a generalized problem; and when you look for solution on Dell's forum you find this FAQ, which tend to say XPS are more foldable desktops than real laptops.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/pm/sleep-...
And if you want to dig into what happening in s2idle, https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-li...
(I've just seen the last posts on that thread and will give it a try)
My previous XPS 13 from 2016 was suspending properly but now I cannot suspend my "laptop" for more than a day (it will die) or store it in a bag (it will become lava). Hibernate does not work either.
I'm learning with this thread that it also happens on Windows and I'm struggling to understand how Dell could decide to sell "laptops" at this price and not test one of the most basic features of a laptop.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211879#c24
I’m running 9310 with linux kernel 5.14.3 for the QCA6390 support as my laptop is the Windows edition.
It's because Intel have been incrementally removing support for s3 sleep, it's completely gone in the latest Tigerlake chips.
Linux s2idle support for modern Intel low CPU package power states is still pretty rough which is why you'll get a good chunk of power drain still.
Just a few days ago I spent hours trying to fix the constant wake-ups. This time it was a waketimer set by the StartMenuExperienceHost.exe process! [1]
Microsoft already removed the Power Management tabs in Device Manager for most devices (mouse, etc.). They also removed the "Allow wake timers" option in Power Options (Surface pro has very limited power options exposed). They also removed the CSEnabled registry key.
[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/how-to...
These shenanigans will keep going on until someone dies and a manager or two at Microsoft is sent to jail for criminal negligence.
This will happen.
> and a manager or two at Microsoft is sent to jail for criminal negligence.
This will never happen.
I don't know whether the checked-luggage scanners catch this or what happens if they find a laptop in luggage.
The passenger isn't present during checked luggage scanning so it would be complicated to try to give the laptop to the passenger. The obvious alternatives look like theft and are extremely inconvenient. (Oh joy, I'm at my destination and my laptop isn't.)
It arrived with a cracked screen so never again...
I resorted to removing the power plug from the PC every evening after it kept turning itself on during the night semi-randomly. It was in "suspend to disk" mode, whatever that is in more technical power-save jargon terms, not just "suspend-to-ram".
I spent a significant amount of time going through Windows event logs to find what caused the wake-ups, fixed some, others were too broad to do anything about it. The settings are useless. So is the Microsoft help forum. I won't even try to ask Dell (Dell 8500 PC), they are only good at sending replacement hardware but unable to answer anything related to software (as long as they do the former I came to accept the latter).
I too had my (also Dell) laptop overheat after I had suspended it, thinking it was turned off. It was very hot when I took it out of the bag later, fortunately it was just in time. It seems this mishap caught a lot of people off guard.
Funny thing has happened in the meantime, since getting a MB Air I haven't plugged it in for like 2 months now...
In "Suspend to RAM", the RAM is kept powered when the computer is shut down, and thus doesn't have to be touched on wake, but it means the computer has to stay powered the whole time.
In "Suspend to disk", the entire RAM is written to disk (which can take some time especially with an HDD) then the computer shuts down entirely, on wake the OS will restore RAM from disk before resuming. The need to read data back from disk to RAM makes the wake costlier, but because everything's on disk the computer can be completely shutdown.
The two can be combined into mode where data is written to disk (making going to sleep slower) then the computer enters "suspend to RAM" mode. If the computer is resumed normally it is restored from RAM, but if the computers suffers power loss it's restored from disk. Either way the computer doesn't have to boot from scratch and all the working set should be recovered. IIRC it's the default behaviour for macOS laptops, microsoft calls it "hybrid sleep".
Mine will wake the screen and make "device connected" and "device disconnected" sounds while the computer isn't sleeping, regularly. Besides being annoying (I eventually disabled those specific sounds), it probably meaningfully hurts the lifespan of my monitors to power cycle them every five freakin' minutes.
I've never been able to figure out what exactly is happening here, trawling through event logs and such (I'm no Windows guru nor do I want to be).
At this point, in my particular case, Linux actually feels more "hardware compatible" than Windows. It can keep the monitors off.
I really wish Windows was good enough to not raise my blood with things like this, because sometimes you just need to use it.
Honestly I'm not sure where else you can find that information.
lastwake will be blank and the power report will just tell you it changed state but give no reason.
One would hope that powercfg /lastwake provides some information, but it doesn't.
There is a big difference between how Window should work in theory and what happens in practice.
He complained about the same thing, in this case on laptops that were completely shutdown the night before. In the end we tracked it down to the Lenovo Vantage service.
I assume it was powering on the laptop to check for updates but I could find no log or record of it doing so. But, once we removed that software the issue went away completely.
Anecdotal I know and I even told him it could be something else, that removing the software may have changed something related but not from Lenovo, etc. But in the end, a few weeks later that is, he confirmed that since we did that, they did not have the problem again.
Mine used to do it at midnight and wake up my desktop till I gave it a static address
I haven't seen this behavior from my ThinkPad X1 Nano, but that may be because it shuts itself down entirely after being closed for an hour or two without being connected to a power source.
900mw - nearly a whole watt - seems very high! Easily enough to cause noticeable warming - a running modern laptop at idle only uses 3-6 watts.
Agree that 900mW is high given that it's not supposed to be doing anything. It is what it is though ... haven't found a way to improve that.
Re. the comparison to idle power, I suppose there's a reason S1 is called "sleep2idle"!!
I'm also not sure if it's a bug or something else. I do feel like there's something problematic about modern standby. I didn't have this issue under Linux, which actually does standby properly.
So manufacturers just neglect this side of things, or cut corners to save money.
It's very annoying that MS doesn't allow us any way to disable Modern Standby. OEMs still haven't figured out how to make old school sleep perfectly reliable. Springing a new standby model on them was doomed to be just troublesome.
I've had two Surface Pro 4's (one of the first "Modern Sleep" devices) develop battery bloat because of this Intel's power mgt incompetence. Microsoft replaced both, but what is this crap costing all of us, both in higher hardware prices and environmental waste?
FWIW, I haven't needed a faster CPU in years - I need more RAM, long, long battery life, and sleep/wake that always works, instantly. If the iPad were capable of being a real computer, it might get me back into the Apple fold, if iOS had a usable UI...
Talk about ruining a perfectly working solution for almost no gain.
And this is even after changing the BIOS setting so that it's always-on USB port isn't always on.
I'm really curious where the power is going. Or if the supplied battery has internal leakage issues.
I asked a very similar question a few months ago. The sleep/standby modes were behaving as other people have reported, however, the fact that the battery was draining rapidly in shutdown mode, on a new Dell with a 3 month-old battery with very few cycles, was a cause for concern. Nevertheless, I tried using the CsEnabled trick, which didn't work. Eventually, after troubleshooting BIOS features, applying the latest updates and using powercfg options -- batteryreport, sleepstudy etc.
I found a solution, which is a compromise at best. The battery drain was 20% within a few hours. But now with S3 sleep state -- it drains around 8-10% in full shutdown mode over a period of 8-10 hours. A similar drain in Standby is over a period of 15-18 hours.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/h0r56s/getting_back_s...
Just 5% would be manageable -- I probably wouldn't even notice it. It's more on the order or 20-30% for me, so if I happen to not use my laptop over the weekend, I'll come back to a completely dead laptop.
A couple times, I've opened the laptop to have it scream at me to plug it in ASAP.
It's frustrating when you put a completely charged laptop to bed and can't get going without having to hunt for a power cord.
This is on a Mac though, so (for me anyway) this is something that just works without any fuss.
It makes it impossible to confirm the laptop is truly off, because opening it to check turns it on. This was especially annoying during my "boarding a plane" ritual where I check everything is right before settling in.
Fridges have this problem too, but if you’re taking one of them on a plane it’s your own fault.
It will try to start up the applications I least care about; meanwhile ignoring the actual context I desire, which just slows me down more.
Something like Outlook or OneNote will restore its state reasonably well, as will Safari/Chrome/Edge/Firefox. Others, like Activity Monitor, Enpass, and iTerm2, decide to "helpfully" open a window for me even though the previous state was "running with no windows open" (which is perfectly valid for many applications).
So we can right back in the context we had? Who wants to spend the first 15 minutes digging out Jira, the issue you worked on, the two related ones, start IntelliJ, digging out the correct screenshots etc etc.
... or even: who wants to stop debugging and turn of the computer just because we are leaving the office to catch the train?
I first learned this on a 486/66 DX2 IBM aptiva desktop in 1995.
I've too had times when it didn't work on Linux but today boil-in-bag seems to be a Windows feature, not supported out of the box on ordinary Linux distros on mainstream hardware ;-)
It's the better option if you don't mind the longer time waking up, since RAM has to be restored from disk.
Otherwise, sleep should be backed by hibernation on all machines (it certainly is on mac laptops, and I think it is on windows as well): in case of power loss during sleep, the machine falls back to waking from hibernation, but if there was no power loss it wakes way faster. This is especially useful for people who move around a lot during the day and will close the laptop, move around, and reopen it. While things have gotten better with modern SSDs, having to restore 16 to 32GB from disk to RAM is far from instant-on.
I recently switched from an XPS 15 to an M1 MacBook Pro, and it's glorious that I just don't have to think about it anymore. The XPS 15 had all the problems I'm reading above, and then some.
The reason they don't write the hibernate image straight away and just power down after an hour is to eliminate writes to the SSD but I believe you can set that wait to 0.
I have a MacBook which performs this flawlessly and my Linux desktop also pauses and restores flawlessly except immediately after installing new Nvidia GPU drivers.
I haven’t thought about different CPU sleep stages in approximately 9 years when I had to make my XPS M1330 handle them in the end years of its life.
I did the same in my ~15 years of Windows & Linux desktops and laptops, with the sole exception of an IBM (yep, was still IBM) Thinkpad on which suspend to disk would magically Just Work on Linux if you created a partition at the correct location, with the correct size, and with the correct type ID. The BIOS handled it somehow, I think, which seems crazy but it did work flawlessly. IIRC I didn't even have to tell Linux about it, and I ran Gentoo at the time so I doubt it was doing anything for me automatically.
Switching to Mac a little over a decade ago broke me of the habit, eventually. It was one of many coping behaviors I didn't need anymore and had to un-learn. Unfortunately, now that I'm used to shit actually working semi-correctly a fair amount of the time (to be clear, Mac is far from perfect, everything else is just so much worse that it's like no-one else is even trying) without my having to spend time forcing it to work, it's hard to go back.
The wifi is still connected, the ssh session I was in is still connected... The tests I was running when the doorbell rang... they pick up where they left off. It's nice.
It's stuff like this that keeps me begrudgingly coming back to Apple for laptops.
Yes and no. There have been weird issues where the machine wakes but the screen stays dark and another where externally connected monitors won’t necessarily work on wake. Possibly some of this is connected fo the hell which is the dongle lifestyle.
Apple seems to have come out the other side of these issues with recent laptops/OS releases (last 18 months).
You want it to return [deep] s2idle
Adding something like, /etc/sysfs.d/set-sleep-to-s2ram.conf:
(The above requires the package 'sysfsutils' to be installed on Debian / Debian derived distributions).On my work supplied xps-13, bluetooth does not survive the laptop being unplugged in "deep" sleep (even for a couple seconds). Fixing bluetooth requires suspend to disk aka "hibernate" or regular reboot to restore. No reloading modules etc. helps. Other than that annoying bug, proper sleep works fine on the hardware.
But, I also had to add, /etc/modprobe.d/i915gpu-fix-xps13-crashes.conf:
To solve the laptop crashing when idle. Originally I disabled c-states on the gpu to fix the crashing, but some other kind soul on the Internet shared the above which solves the crashing, but doesn't kill battery life like my fix.Luckily you can turn it off, at least in Linux, and then the machine functions more-or-less normally.
There are still some things that can annoyingly wake it (usually a bluetooth device trying to pair to it); but it's an odd exception versus the 50% chance every time I went to transport my laptop with Windows.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/146593-enable-disable-ne...
The XPS that I recently replaced had to be closed at night, which annoyed me every day. If left open, it would detect that it was idle and shut off the display. Except that that only worked on the laptop screen. The external monitor would go through a permanent cycle of shutting off, waking up, displaying a "no signal" message, shutting off, waking up...
This doesn't happen with other laptops on the same monitor. Something was broken pretty badly.
Are they planning to keep that obviously broken behavior as the forum post seems to imply, or they will fix it?