My new ThinkPad, which I absolutely love otherwise, keeps the CPU fans running if I put it to "sleep". Which left me completely flabbergasted the first time it happened! I've had to force-enable hibernation and use that for any kind of backpack travel. Which will shorten the lifespan of the SSD, but what else am I supposed to do?
I think Windows will shorten the lifespan of your SSD even if you use "shut down", at least if you don't disable "fast startup". "Fast startup" basically replaces "shut down" with a light form of hiberation, which makes shutting the machine down take a long while and turning it on about a second faster. Not worth the tradeoff in my opinion. I also got some bugs when using fast startup, sometimes the sound wouldn't work until a reboot or my WiFi took weirdly long to connect. This is on a Lenovo Yoga/IdeaPad.
Unfortunately a lot of Laptop manufacturers were forced to leave the fans on all the time due to overheating which would cause battery issues if they didn't run the fans.
I remember getting a BIOS update on my Dell a few years ago that permanently turned the fan on too.
There shouldn't be any overheating when in S3, from what power usage ??
And they can wait to switch to S3 (and shut down the fans) once the temperature got low enough, a bit like how with S3+swap, the computer won't enter suspend until the RAM has been copied to swap.
Is it running Windows? I've found that on Linux this specific issue doesn't happen, it will turn off the fans, and they will stay off. But the battery is still drained, even though, on average, I tend to get better battery life than with Windows on the same machine.
But Windows tends to wake it up randomly and do God knows what, since the PC will actually be hot to the touch.
Bonus points for attempting to install updates, then reboot, only to end up stuck waiting for the BitLocker PIN.
The BitLocker thing is definitely a problem. On Apple systems which have a similar FDE system, the preboot environment will shut the machine down if the page is left open for too long. The CPU/GPU (if present) are in a pre-power-management state during this time too, so the laptop will really heat up.
I wonder how limited the preboot BitLocker screen environment really is. Could there could be some flag set by the UEFI that says "I'm a laptop and the lid is closed without power connected, shut down after a timeout".
In my case, my computers will end up on that screen in two cases.
The first is my desktop, without a TPM, which will ask for a BitLocker password. In this case, if I'm not fast enough, it will shut down the computer.
The second is my work laptop, which I usually expect to reboot or otherwise am around when it ends up there, in which case I'll usually type in the PIN quickly enough. However, I expect it to have a similar behavior as the first case, although I haven't tried.
But the reason I know this happens, is that I once left this PC attached to my 32" screen next to my bed, and it woke me up at night. I just went and forcibly shut off the thing.
So apparently this is actually configurable, but it's either on or off, and it's set to one minute by default (either 1 minute or no shutdown, no inbetween).
The command in question is ```bcdedit /set {bootmgr} bootshutdowndisabled 1```.
>But Windows tends to wake it up randomly and do God knows what, since the PC will actually be hot to the touch.
For the best part of a decade the first thing I do on any mobile device I touch is disable wake calls in the power plan settings. Learned it the hard way after the T420 woke me up multiple times per night with loud beeps...
If your notebook has 16 GB of RAM that needs to be written out every time it hibernates, and you do that three times a day, five days a week, you’d accumulate about 63 TB of writes over five years. That’s roughly a third of the TBW rating for an average 256 GB SSD. A typical 1 TB SSD would have three times the endurance or more.
I'd say 1/3rd is a rather large chunk of an SSDs TBW if its just for hibernating. In practice, for reasons you outlined, it would be a smaller amount but I would only find 1-2% tolerable.
Chances are, the computer will break or be replaced in five years or less. It doesn’t really matter if you reach 2%, 33%, or even 90% of the TBW if the system or component is replaced before it uses up all its writes.
> Chances are, the computer will break or be replaced in five years or less.
I think this is less and less true as time goes on. I have a laptop from 5 ish years ago I still use and it's actually pretty fast.
And, even so, it's not like the ONLY wear on your SSD is the hibernation. So this 5 year figure, I'm not sure it's right. I think, maybe if you're someone who stresses your hard drives a lot (maybe you work with photography or videography?) hibernation might make an impactful difference.
The five-year estimate is based solely on hibernation writes, which is a very conservative figure. In reality, most users will use closer to 2% of the TBW for hibernation, not 33%.
For those with heavy I/O workloads, they likely have higher-grade or larger SSDs with a higher TBW rating.
Additionally, TBW isn’t a hard limit and can often be exceeded, with some drives lasting beyond 200%.
For most users, TBW won’t be an issue, and other components are more likely to fail before the drive wears out.
LTT had a rant about this [modern sleep] and I really hoped it would draw some attention given his size and reach. It is truly mind-blowing that not even Apple got it right.
From personal experience, it's still safe to never shut down an apple laptop, just throw it in the backpack/suitcase and it will be cool and with the same battery at the destination.
Tbh all my Apple laptops, including the piece of shit one with the emoji keyboard, have had no problem sleeping.
Ofc that's on mac os, not sure what they offer if you install linux or windows.
macOS has its own fair share of sleep bugs, particularly stuff like Parallels, IntelliJ or MS Teams for whatever reason routinely manage to prevent sleep or to randomly activate and hog the dGPU, turning a "lap top" to a "testicle airfryer".
More than once I went on a train ride to the office, having clicked "Suspend" in the main menu and watching the screen go black before placing the laptop in my bag, just to find out the battery was completely drained and the 2019 MBP so hot that it not just required cooling down before it would power up again but also hot enough to fry an egg - an IR thermometer showed 70 °C!
If anyone knows or writes an application that could place a red warning icon in the menu bar warning me that "suspending" will not actually work, I'll be glad to exchange it for a crate of beer.
> particularly stuff like Parallels, IntelliJ or MS Teams for whatever reason routinely manage to prevent sleep or to randomly activate and hog the dGPU
mac os is nice enough to allow applications to prevent sleep. Check "pmset -g assertions" to point out the culprit.
A couple years ago it was Chrome for me. It kept an assertion saying "WebRTC has active peer connections" on all the time. This has only lead me to have a pathological hatred for WebRTC and I turn it off in all my browsers now.
As for the dGPU, i've never had one but I do have a feeling that spells trouble, especially with these electron apps and their Helper (GPU) processes. I'm old fashioned enough to do most of my work on desktops that are plugged in and only buy lightweight laptops (13-14 inch mbpros wit no discrete GPU).
I know who the culprits are, Activity Monitor shows it in the Energy tab.
But since it's sporadic, I sometimes forget to look into Activity Monitor if I'm in a rush, and for fucks sake this is not a problem that should exist in the first place.
I mean, yes, I've had more issues back when I still used Windows, but my Apple gear costs thousands of dollars, I expect better quality.
I expect that if the system knows that my intent will not be successful (because some application locks suspend) that the option is either not available/greyed out or that I at least get a goddamn prompt "XYZ is locking suspend. <Abort attempt/Force suspend>".
As for Electron, yes, Teams is cursed in that regard (as it is in locking the dGPU), but for me it's usually Parallels, closely followed by IntelliJ that randomly messes up suspend. Neither of them are Electron.
> I mean, yes, I've had more issues back when I still used Windows
Tbh I don't understand why an OS would allow applications to prevent sleep either, but you mentioned MS Teams and I mentioned Google :)
I don't think IntelliJ ever prevented sleep for me, but I mostly used the Android Studio flavor. I've caught it using up all my ram though if i left it on for weeks.
As for Parallels, I've never tried to close a laptop with a running VM on it. I don't know why, but I always suspend the VMs manually (from the Parallels menu for example) if i use them.
I’m hopeful that ARM based laptops will have better power management on Linux. Totally agree with what you have written. Ironically though, Microsoft standby sucks on Linux and Windows. Happy to be running a Mac.
I’m curious how well Asahi linux works with standby on a Apple Silicon Mac.
IME experience, at least on HP G8 EliteBooks, both AMD and Intel, Linux actually keeps the machine quiet and cool during "modern standby". With Windows, it absolutely will turn on the fans at some point, and the machine absolutely will get hot for whatever reason.
This seems to have been fixed for a while now (say a year or so), but when the Intel machine was new, Windows would sometimes not wake up from sleep, or if did, the screen would be garbled.
The AMD still has an issue where Windows will "unexpectedly shutdown" (according to the event log) during modern standby. This happens every single time I leave it on standby during the night. This is an almost four-year-old machine by now, not some brand-spanking-new thing, which works otherwise perfectly, especially on Linux.
It’s not so much the heat that bothers most people, but the fact that when you close the lid of a windows laptop and throw it in your backpack, it will be totally out of battery, be running and you have to actually physically turn it off. Simply close the lid ane leave it in your backpack on a Mac and it will still retain most of it’s charge.
I think most people intend their laptop to retain it’s charge when they close the lid and standby used to do this, but on windows machines, it really doesn’t anymore.
It should really write all the ram to hd after a short period of time in your backpack instead of quickly depleting the battery.
> I’m curious how well Asahi linux works with standby on a Apple Silicon Mac.
I’ve not tried it long but from my short experience, it works well.
Btw, Asahi is actually really easy to install if you are curious. Everything is done/installed from macOS including shrinking your macOS partition. And uninstalling it is as simple as removing the partition from Disk Manager and growing back your macOS partition.
All you need is some disk space and, one command line to copy paste and about 20 minutes.
And it works really well overall. It have everything to be a daily driver (including graphics acceleration) except external display support and TouchID. But both of those issues are being worked on.
I played with Asahi on my personal use MacBook Air. It is great for the things it does. But, I’m waiting on the USB-C implementation and the external monitor support before thinking about switching to it for proper use. For now, it is just checking in every month or so to see what all works and what doesn’t.
But overall, I was pretty impressed by Fedora Asahi. I was expecting a clunky experience with hacks and bugs everywhere but I'm now actually expecting to use it as my daily driver as soon as possible.
Like, there are those things (USB-C, external display, Touch ID) that doesn't work at all but everything else works wonderfully. Even the audio is as good as on macOS (thanks to the specially built audio driver) which iirc, have never been the case on Intel macs (yes, audio works on intel but the sound is better on macOS because Apple have a special driver that is able to shortly and safely overdrive the speakers to get better sound - and asahi replicated this driver).
My old ASUS laptop that triggers complete poweroff when a sleep command is sent to the motherboard, making sure you lose any work you had open as punishment for assuming it had a sleep mode: "I'm four parallel universes ahead of you."
Or get a Macbook Air. Got the M1 in a few minutes in John Lewis and still good. No sleep problems, no fan to whirr.
The previous Macbook Air 11 also was great for sleep/wake. The Windows 7 Thinkpad before that was ok but took like 30 seconds to restart from sleep and would crash sometimes.
> Therefore Consumers have the option to state their disapproval with the current state of S0ix by buying Laptops that still support S3.
I’d like to do this, as I find a laptop that cannot last in sleep for at least a week ill-suited for my needs. Where do I go to figure out if my next laptop supports proper sleep?
I didn't know S3 vs S0 but this may be the reason why I never keep my laptop in sleep mode and I prefer to put it in hibernate. What about hibernate? Couldn't it be an alternative to the "legacy sleep"?
Hibernate mode takes a long time to enter and exit, as it involves writing a lot of data to disk and then reading it back upon resuming. The whole point of Sleep mode is that it's fast: you just close the lid and you're in sleep mode, saving power. Then if you want to check something quickly, or resume your work, you just open the lid and in a few seconds or less, your computer is fully operational again.
Well, you're right but of Sleep is impractical with S0 mode as explained, hibernate with slightly longer transition time may be acceptable. Hibernate has really became fast on modern computers.
You're in luck, Windows shutdown is now actually hibernate (and has been for a few years). So if you just shutdown your laptop, you've been using this hibernate for a while. Turns out all those people saying "shut down your laptop before you close the lid!" were actually right.
As someone who used to work at Microsoft, this is spot on. The sheer amount of arrogance coming from (some of) my peers who worked there was incredible.
Microsoft decides for you how you would like to use your computer. If you don't agree, use Linux. Or Mac, but Apple is really no better than Microsoft with regard to arrogance.
I'd say Apple is even more arrogant, but at least their software is arrogantly functional.
Maybe I could look past this sleep nonsense if their super cool new sleep actually worked. But it just doesn't, instead it cooks your laptop 10% of the time and it you open it up and it's dead.
The fact that they are pushing S3 as "Linux Sleep" or "Legacy Sleep" and S0ix as "modern sleep" is absolutely not innocent from a marketing perspective.
We ought to reverse Uno this non-sense. Perhaps the Linux Foundation and all the distro development teams out there should start calling S3 _True_Sleep_™ in all their official communication.
I swear I remember Microsoft adding "sleep" and calling it such in some version of Windows because "it's new and different from 'suspend'", then later other systems started using the term "sleep" instead of "suspend" without actually changing anything.
It's gotten better but it's very dependent on chipsets and driver support for those. I have one Samsung laptop with an Intel chipset that more or less goes standby reliably. Sometimes it still messes up and it's dead when you open it. But mostly it's fine and it's gotten more rare with recent kernel versions. The fingerprint reader is pretty much the only thing that doesn't work on that laptop and probably never will because it's a cheap Chinese thing with some proprietary firmware.
The core issue is that the firmware in most laptops is just ancient garbage and nobody seems to really care about it. Apple has full ownership over their own firmware so it's less of an issue for them (though it still has issues). But most chip manufacturers servicing the wintel laptop market treat software as an afterthought. They aren't very good at it and they just put in the minimum effort that they can get away with. So, it's all proprietary, poorly designed, decades old, etc. If it breaks they bang on it until it sort of works again (windows only).
Laptop makers then make things worse by just buying a lot of cheap components. Synaptic seems popular for touch pads, for example. My Samsung has one. It's not good. I've actually never come across anything made by them that wasn't garbage.
With Linux slowly creeping up in market share on desktops, it's something that could start changing. Most Linux users are very selective in what they buy and there are certain brands that are just so hopeless that people actively avoid them. Lenovo bought a good reputation from IBM when they acquired their laptop division. That's ages ago but they sort of nurtured that and it's probably helped a lot. It's not rocket science to just make sure things work on Linux.
My work laptop is a macbook. The hardware is just miles ahead of the competition. It's just not even close. Everything else is a major downgrade. I bought that Samsung to replace a mac because I was waiting for the M1 to come out when my old laptop died. I worked on that thing for half a year. Going back to a mac was just such major upgrade in every way possible. You forget how great they are. Software wise I'm actually fine with Linux. Everything I use is open source or available for Linux. I don't use any of the Apple software (the i* stuff). I'm there for the hardware only. If Linux support catches up, I might switch actually.
Same! It's unfortunate that the names collide. I was also totally confused.
From the article,
> Traditional Sleep requires all system hardware and software components to work together. The operating system must support Sleep, as well as the hardware (e.g. CPU) and the BIOS/UEFI. According to the UEFI to Hardware Interface Standard (ACPI), this usual form of sleep is referred to as S3. S3 is a Sleep State in which all system components, except for the RAM and CPU Cache, are powered off.
Me too - to those using acronyms and other abbreviations in their writing, even "obvious ones": it is a good practice to introduce what each stands for the first time it gets used.
ACL = Access Control List / Association for Computational Linguistics
AAA = Authentication Authorization, Accounting / American Automobile Association / Triple-A Battery Size
...
S3 = AWS Simple Storage Service / ACPI Sleep States: S3 is one of them, they range from S0 - S5) / Suspend-to-Idle (S0ix) "Windows 10" mode selected in system firmware, "s2idle" selected in /sys/power/mem_sleep, and Suspend-to-RAM (S3)
Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere? A lot of the theoretical benefits of it, IMO, have been relatively theoretical. Perhaps Windows updates, but the computers I've used with Modern Standby still have to spend time installing updates when awake.
I cannot imagine what the benefit of receiving notifications and other information like this on a Windows system would be. As far as I know, very, very few apps are programmed for the native "App" development flow (or even to use the notifications api) as opposed to "desktop" apps, and the number only gets smaller as you go into long tail enterprise apps. Perhaps this was designed for Outlook, but I think the use case is dubious.
Of course, there are millions of laptops in the wild, many of which are undoubtedly used by the people who work on Windows. Every time I find the laptop closed and running its fans, or find a computer in a bag that is slightly warm near the CPU (expected behaviour of working Modern Standby), I wonder whether it's just my computer or if it's every single one of them out there. Do people just accept that their computer has to be either shut down or will have an unknown amount of remaining power? It seems like there would have been a huge push to get this fixed if it was really broken, but I rarely hear users talking about it.
Of course I do wonder whether with the advent of the new Qualcomm ARM CPUs, whether they have finally managed to get Modern Standby to be a good clone of what Android devices do...
>Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere?
Why is this important, or even something to consider? The only thing that's important with Windows and features in it is whether something delivers value to Microsoft.
But does it? Nobody asked for it, it's not even meaningfully used by any Microsoft product and can't drive sales for them, its endless litany of bugs just increase support workloads.
You have a good point, but there's probably some department manager who got a big bonus from being able to spin this "feature" as a great thing and implement it.
> Perhaps this was designed for Outlook, but I think the use case is dubious.
Oh, sweet summer child. I sometimes use Windows on my work machine, complete with the "new" Teams and "new" Outlook. For some reason, these need a while to update when I wake my machine from sleep, even though it usually sleeps connected to power, with a network cord plugged in and in range of Wi-Fi. Teams, in particular, will say it's offline for a few minutes, even though I can browse the web as soon as the box actually becomes interactive.
The computer actually does something while asleep, judging by how hot it gets. But, as you say, it's really not clear what. It will do this even though Defender is deactivated (we have some other handbrake at work which doesn't do a full system scan on its own) and the system is fully up-to-date.
> Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere?
Why do you think it was created to deliver value to the customer?
It is merely a reason for Microsoft to spy^Hextract value from a customer even when the PC is sleeping. Like humans, laptop spend a third of their life in sleep mode and it would be nice to monetise that time, multiplied by a couple billion users.
I think it is clear that the goal of the Windows division is to milk every user for all their worth. By the time they are done, laptops will be an obsolete product and Microsoft doesn't really want to support Windows 20 more years.
I guess this was pitched by some product person as the feature that brings the laptop on and connects to wifi instantly when you open the lid. All the other uses are post facto justifications. This was all dreamt up when Apple was still on x86. Obviously, now that Apple has superior battery life, these gimmicks don't make any sense.
Modern Standby enables much faster return from Standby. You open the lid of your device and it's there. That's not the case with S3. I find it adds a lot of convenience.
How is this the case? Suspend to/from RAM on Linux wakes up in less than a second in my experience. Which makes sense, because everything is still in RAM and systemd doesn't need to do a bunch of work to get everything back online. Maybe Windows has a weird implementation of S3?
My 10 year old Thinkpad with S3 wakes up in the time it takes to open the lid, with almost as much battery as it had when I put it to sleep days ago.
My shiny new work laptop without S3 wakes up in the same time, and then says "Battery critically low, shutting down."
This is not a convenience, it's insubordination. I told it to sleep, and it didn't.
But you know what's really insane? When the new work laptop is just sitting there with the screen locked and I walk up and hit a key, it takes longer to just display the password box than the 10 year old Thinkpad takes to wake up from S3 and display the password box. (Ok, it's an unfair comparison, Windows vs Linux, but still...)
Funny, one of the reason why I started heavily using S4 rather than S3 was because with SSDs the time to restart from swap was so fast that it was barely more an inconvenience.
> Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere?
I guess the value is for enterprise users because the ecosystem is so bad.
When I return from sleep on my laptop, my VPN is disconnected and can't reconnect itself automatically as I need to go through the auth + 2FA phase. I am also logged of all Azure AD authenticated web apps and Microsoft web apps like Teams and Outlook are so bad they don't automatically sign in back when you have signed on on other Azure AD resources.
I haven't started my corporate laptop on the original windows 10 for years so I can't compare but I imagine a "modern standby" would have some keepalive on the VPN connections and apps like teams so they don't sign you out?
But in the end this is kind of useless on those Dell laptops because it drains the battery so fast and they have such a low battery life that you just want to shut them down if they are not connected to their docking statino. I guess it serves the people who are on-prem and close the lid to go from one meeting room to another.
But when I was working on-prem I would just configure it to just lock the laptop and would use the sleep shortcut to put the laptop to a normal sleep. Apparently most people were too dumb to figure that out and would walk between their desk and the meeting room awkwardly with the lid up, I can't believe they have managers roles or are even allowed to work in the IT industry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Keeping VPN connections alive could be beneficial. Most current laptops do not have cellular modem though so they will have no internet connection while being transported. VPN will therefore stop working anyway. In fact the entire laptop will stop working when it overheats in the bag.
What I don't understand is, if this issue is so pervasive, why aren't these laptop models getting terrible reviews by both professional and non-professional reviewers ?
I use an IdeaPad with a 4000 series Ryzen. It works fine for the time being.
Articles like these make me afraid that the damn thing will break eventually and I'll have to spend exorbitants amounts of money on something like a Framework to get a usable Linux experience.
Not to mention that having a fake-off state like S0ix is a golden ticket for covert surveillance (like our phones don't do enough for the gestapo). I don't think anybody cares about Cortana, even less so on a suspended laptop. The notifications and update angle is really suspicious as well.
My intel 12th gen works find in s2idle or deep(s3) running Fedora. deep is lasts a little longer but that might be because of configuration, which is a bigger part of s2idle.
The community.frame.work forum has reports from people running newer boards so you don't have to guess before buying.
That is just peak level stupidity. I sometimes boot into Windows, and every time Windows Update runs, the fans are on high, my system is taken hostage ("Do not turn off your computer - updates ready 100%" - showing for 15 minutes), and there is nothing I can do about it.
Compared to this, an `apt upgrade` is basically an instant action (only kernel updates take a bit longer). Too bad Ubuntu is trying to break that with snap, but it is still a minor inconvenience.
You are completely missing the point of the original comment. Why is my computer unusable for X minutes when I didn't expect that and perhaps, needed some critical work done?
No one has to call Torvalds, they can patch the stuff themselves if they're in such a hurry that they can't wait the few hours/days for a contributor to push a patch.
I wouldn‘t call the always–on feature stupid but deliberate. The purpose of modern Windows being an ad surface and capture device for learning everything the user knows from user interaction. Switching off Windows Updates, even on Windows Pro and Windows 10, is practically impossible, short of isolating it from net access.
The user can choose to use operating systems and applications that let him configure which apps get to run in the background and at which times. You don't want email updates while asleep? Configure your OS to implement this policy. There's no reason that hardware makers should continue to support multiple and legacy sleep modes like S3 just because OS vendors don't give users appropriate policy knobs in software.
Why is S3 "legacy"? Just because Microsoft says so?
When it is working, S3 sleep covers my needs perfectly. And it is not about email updates. I don't want my laptop to do anything while in sleep. It's that simple.
You're right. Why should hardware vendors target operating systems that exist?
Sure, S0 on Windows makes your laptop turn on in your bag for impossible-to-disable updates, causing it to overheat or the battery to run down. And no laptops on the market will S0 on Linux without running down the battery in less than 24 hours.
Why should hardware vendors mollycoddle users who make the foolish decision to use either Windows or Linux?
That's CYA nonsense, up there with "Q-tips aren't for cleaning ears". (Yes, they are.) Nobody actually shuts down his laptop before chucking it in his bag.
> Nobody actually shuts down his laptop before chucking it in his bag.
I do. I had a few poor experiences with laptops accidentally turning on while in the bag between 1995 and 2010.
After the last time, in 2010, when the thing started beeping due to overheating, I started the habit of shutting down/hibernating completely instead of just closing the lid and popping it into the bag.
Laptops still occasionally do that. I'm kind of impressed that they manage to keep chugging even when the lack of airflow keeps them at >90°C for the entire time it takes for either me to notice that they turned back on, or drain their battery.
They don't, but the problem is the laptop manufacturers and/or Microsoft have fucked up the implementation sufficiently that it's no longer a safe operation.
I have opened my backpack to find it very hot because my laptop accumulated a bunch of heat in its cushioned pouch and subsequently drained all it's battery
It is not nonsense. I had my laptop turning on from sleep mode inside my bag and getting really hot, because of idiotic Windows 7 settings back then, which turned the device on, when networks changed. It is just ridiculous. Probably still in there that default. Since that day, I always shutdown my device completely.
Don't conclude from your own carelessness to others. Even just one person shutting down their laptop will instantly disprove your claim, that "nobody does XYZ". So you will basically almost always be wrong with such a statement/claim.
I know more than one person who ended in the ER with a perforated eardrum because of qtips. I honestly don't understand why we haven't outlawed them yet (in countries with universal healthcare, in the US you could just have a more expensive health insurance if you choose to use them).
I suspect that the real reason for this change is to ensure that Windows gets updated even if the laptop is sleeping, and that this is a change that enterprise customers have asked for.
In the past where a computer would be connected to the corporate network all the time you could usually get Wake-on-LAN to work so you could boot computers at night to apply updates and ensure that users weren't waiting around forever. With laptops and people working remotely you need a new way to ensure that the bulk of the updates happen when they won't interfere with users trying to work - this is the solution.
Microsoft may well tout additional potential benefits, but that's more about selling it to consumers so they don't complain about changes as much.
And, of course, some manufacturers do a better job than others at implementing this. --I haven't had a problem with any of my Lenovo laptops or even the Surface laptop. Dell, on the other hand, doesn't seem to implement it well at all.
My company laptop has sleep _disabled_, and all the caches, cookies, browsing history etc. are cleared when I log off or shut down. I guess this is due to security reasons. No updates while "sleeping" in my case.
Cellebrite is built around that reason: USB/Thunderbolt stack vulnerabilities, etc., that allow the full-disk encryption key to be extracted out of the RAM of a running system.
I believe iOS is capable of flushing most cleartext data on suspend until the passcode is reentered, so suspend should be as good as shutdown; I don’t know if macOS can do it. On desktop Linux it’s theoretically possible with systemd-homed, but in practice that needs desktop-environment support that’s as far as I know does not exist, so shutting down is more secure. I can’t remember anything about Android either way except for some features for disabling the USB port in some alternative firmware.
On Windows with a typical TPM-only setup, powering off is probably just as bad as suspending, because just powering the machine back on is enough for it to helpfully unlock everything. If you do need to enter a BitLocker passphrase at boot, then you’re in the same situation as typical desktop Linux, so powering off is more secure.
> a change that enterprise customers have asked for
"enterprise customers" have proper security policies and tooling to enforce them in place.
My employer has a "small" utility that periodically checks for version of installed software and will warn me if I don't install the necessary updates. If I don't install updates for more then x days I'm cut off every network access to the corporate network, and I must first install the updates and then ask my manager to let me back in the corporate network (again, there's automated tooling for that).
So this push for "always on" bullshit is not what enterprises asked for.
Microsoft wants mac/ios/android-like experience, but just can't deliver such thing due to hardware fragmentation.
I never understood why microsoft doesn't go full apple and only allows certain top-tier features on surface laptops or other hardware they own from top to bottom.
If you're serious about software you can't underrate the role of hardware: Apple has clearly got this incredibly right, and it's a fundamental part of their value proposition.
While I don’t disagree with you, if Microsoft started gating premium Windows features to their own hardware, both the US and EU would serve them the antitrust suit to end all antitrust suits.
> I suspect that the real reason for this change is to ensure that Windows gets updated even if the laptop is sleeping, and that this is a change that enterprise customers have asked for.
But you don't want that to happen when your laptop is in your backpack.
It is bonkers that Microsoft and manufacturers both would remove the ability for the users to decide it is not a good idea to have an OS running. It effectively forces anyone to shutdown completely their laptops.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but trying to show ads when the laptop lid is closed and the machine is in "sleep mode" (with quotes) is not exactly smart, is it. But again, if MS can still charge their advertisers for such silliness, maybe it makes economical sense (for MS).
Having the microphone on to capture useful information from the environment would be helpful for ad targeting, though I don't know offhand where on the spectrum from paranoid to expected behaviour that would be these days.
Indeed, I need to remember to unplug the USB-C cable between my macbook pro and my screen, otherwise it flickers on and off every couple of seconds during the night
wired controllers on nintendo switch docks do this, and yes, it is really annoying. It is about every 3 minutes. and it's for the same reason as the macs and windows machines - the switch wakes up and checks for updates then goes back to sleep.
IIRC you can’t run updates while the laptop is asleep though, as that typically requires a user password to initiate. Even with MDM you can’t force updates during sleep
That problem is solved by the Bootstap Token in modern macOS and MDMs which support it. The token gets escrowed with the MDM during enrolment and can be used to unseal the volume for updates without prompting for a password. Good for unattended updates to kiosks or whatever.
Its even worse if you have a bitlocker config that requires a pin.
It will reboot during the update but then fail the boot because noone entered the pin in time, leaving you to complete the update actively when you open it back up.
Ironically this happens even if you select "update and shutdown" because the restart happens during the update process.
It also violates the core idea of sleep mode: Keep the current state of my computer intact until I continue working. If a windows update forces a reboot, then that computer state will be lost.
if it would work correctly it's acctually a grate UX boon for the user
basically you don't block any bandwidth while a user is using the computer and instead when they are not
also you download slower (less bandwidth) in the background because you have much more time available to download it (like e.g. the whole night)
this feature is also only about downloads, that windows tends to force apply updates once they are downloaded is a different unrelated issue altogether
so theoretically especially for laptops which are only used idk. 1-2h max a day for people with not so fast internet this could be grate
could because it isn't, due to implementation details
e.g. you would only want to run this if you are: plugged in (power), the internet is reliable (at least as reliable as "normally" for any given network) etc.
but AFIK it doesn't really detect changes in power status, doesn't detect bad natwork conditions (which can lead to increased power use), and probably doesn't use "intentional slow" download either
you also can't opt out
so yeah it seems shit with how it's implemented -- but the idea by itself isn't bad
One of the top reasons I'm staying with MacBooks. It's not unusual for my laptop to have hundreds of days of uptime. Going back to shutting down everything every time I close the lid is unusable for me at this point.
Whoever fixes this first will make a lot of money.
Edit: SteamDeck is also very good at this and that's why I'm sticking to it for handheld gaming.
Is there a specific piece of software or driver you got installed on all of them? I've owned 2 of 3 of your MacBook model years and 'sleep on lid close' was very reliable on all of them.
Apple Silicon works even better, resume from sleep is instanteneous instead of taking 1-2 seconds.
A few were work laptops, so they came with the suite of poorly-written corporate spyware agents which I suspect was the culprit.
On my personal laptops the cause could be all the accumulated junk I installed. Apple's refusal to support legacy software may help out since it seems the old software doesn't want to run on new hardware.
The issue is not for one person or company to fix. Just like it's impossible to convince all the OSS desktop folks to follow one displayserver/toolkit/UX paradigm it's equally impossible to enforce bug free hardware and drivers from all the PC hardware manufacturers and whatever Microsoft is doing at the moment it seems fixing this is very low on the priority list...
It depends what your risk profile is. There are no absolutes.
Numerous minor updates have screwed up things for me, particularly with some applications I rely on. I will usually lag 2-3 patches behind and wait for other people to suffer first and confirm what I use is stable. I am still on Sonoma / 14.5 at the moment.
Incidentally I actually have a Mac Pro here which is running Monterey which hasn't been patched for about 9 months. The universe has not and will not be imploding any time soon.
Everyone forgets the "availability" bit of security.
I find it a bit surprising that this is still a thing. Why is there ever a time when I _must_ reboot? Is it just that mainstream kernels were designed at a time when people had lower expectations around this sort of thing, and now it's too hard to evolve their designs toward something that would allow for zero-downtime patching in ~all cases?
Other examples that make me wonder if it's mostly because people haven't demanded better:
- Enormous updates for all kinds of things (gigabytes for a bug fix release) because differential updates aren't pervasive.
- Windows updates where a huge amount of work is done during the "rebooting" phase (why can't most of this be done before reboot?)
- Absolutely atrocious power management on pretty much anything that's not a MacBook, and even not perfect on those.
I never thought we'd have flying cars by now, but if you asked me a decade ago to predict the future of operating systems... it wouldn't be this.
If I leave it on sleep for a long time it dies also. But it's perfect for playing games in short breaks, especially with kids. I can immediately drop it when one wakes up crying and return back to it a few hours later and pick up where I've left off.
Good you do not hold a company-controlled macbook where they force you (after annoying you to death) to do OS upgrades that may break software they themselves provide and require you to use. And then tell you to wait the next of apple's update or some fix because there is nothing they can do. At least windows updates usually do not break software. Unless something gets corrupted or wrong on the way and it does not boot to the OS at all, in which case good luck.
Note that security updates are independent of the OS updates (or should be). There is no real excuse of forcing a user upgrade an OS version.
Otherwise under personal use/control macbooks are great, though, in not forcing you do updates of annoy you to death about them.
Windows updates have lately been causing lots of problems, from relatively benign things like getting stuck in background failure loops to more problematic things like silently removing drivers to outright nasty things like constant BSODs. Using both macOS and Windows regularly, I'd say the two companies are neck and neck for how cavalierly they've been breaking things with major OS updates.
Closing the lid and putting it into the bag has the same effect for me.
I've my own ritual for preparing myself for the "I am done" phase. Doing the last commits, writing down a few sentences on what should I do when I go back to work and closing the lid.
I have to restart my MacBook every few days unfortunately because sometimes it just has weird issues (like usb devices or networking stopping working).
MacBooks aren't immune to sleep issues either though. Mine used to forget the external display about a fifth of the time, and forget it has any display at all once every 20 or 30 lid close->open cycle.
The solution happened to be unplug and replug for the first issue, and force reboot for the second. I've enough people having issues with external displays that I don't think it's an isolated problem.
For comparison a Surface Pro failing to go to sleep or getting hot in the bag hasn't happened to me in 2 years of owning these machines. It might surely happen, but it's far from a regular occurrence I think.
I only use mine occasionally, so I turn it off an put in a drawer. When I power it on a few months later the battery is flat, and the machines date in far in the past.
This have never happened with any other laptop I've had.
I see S3 as another victim of the enforced convergence of PC and mobile that MS did get into with Windows 8.
On paper modernizing S3 made even sense since getting all the system components to work nicely with S3 is not an easy task. What wasn't thought off is that handling the same task in modern standby generally isn't easier.
Steve Jobs had an insight that a computer was just another household appliance
But it was built by engineers who came from the homebrew world
This is a great example of how our appliance has gotten worse, even though it’s on hardware that is 1000x the throughput, and we’ve lost the ability to configure it too
This has destroyed one of my older laptops, it decided on its own to patch itself while in a laptop bag in sleep mode. It was a "workstation" laptop that can draw something like 60W from battery, and it promptly cooked itself. The plastic melted and smoke was coming out of the bag. On a moving train.
Here's the thing: this self-serving behaviour from Microsoft will eventually kill someone, or quite possibly a large number of people. It's just a matter of time until a high-powered laptop does this in someone's luggage on a plane, catches fire, and then there will be congressional investigations like we had with the Boeing 737 MCAS system.
In both cases near-monopoly companies are gambling with peoples' lives to meet some internal KPI that in the grand scheme of things just doesn't matter... but it does to some manager's bonus, so you see... people are going to have to die.
Thing is.... My gigantic desktop computer has thermal cutoffs, it will shut down if the CPU gets too hot. I remember desktop PCs having that for ages. I've had overheating laptops do the same. Are laptop manufacturers just getting lazy and skimping on failsafe hardware temperature cut-offs!?? Like, as a hardware manufacturer I would always add that factor-of-5 "the software side WILL fuck up" safety measures. How is the HARDWARE allowing software to let it melt itself in this day and age!?
Having accountants and not engineers architecting software and hardware gets you to that point. Crappy engineers don’t help too, there are too many unskilled people in „IT”
„old” and „legacy” hardware 8-10 years ago was fighting with the tasks and you could still put laptop on your legs. Funny enough yesterday I went into this sleep stuff, because my 5yo Dell battery drained while being „shut down” after 1.5 weeks and while charging I tried to run 2 tabs in browser to look for fix and my legs burned - so I had to put it diagonally on the table to cool down.
We have order of magnitude faster hardware capable of doing order of magnitude less things.
It's probably because the hardware was not designed to be operating at full power surrounded by insulation (i.e. in a bag). In that scenario the parts that the hardware monitors may still be at 'acceptable' temperatures (which can be ~100C), while other (unmonitored) parts that would not normally get that hot get way too hot.
I remember the same kind of annoyances already in 2009 with Windows (Vista!). It's one of the reasons that made me switch to Mac without any regret. Nothing seems to have changed in 15 years.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadI remember getting a BIOS update on my Dell a few years ago that permanently turned the fan on too.
And they can wait to switch to S3 (and shut down the fans) once the temperature got low enough, a bit like how with S3+swap, the computer won't enter suspend until the RAM has been copied to swap.
But Windows tends to wake it up randomly and do God knows what, since the PC will actually be hot to the touch.
Bonus points for attempting to install updates, then reboot, only to end up stuck waiting for the BitLocker PIN.
I wonder how limited the preboot BitLocker screen environment really is. Could there could be some flag set by the UEFI that says "I'm a laptop and the lid is closed without power connected, shut down after a timeout".
The first is my desktop, without a TPM, which will ask for a BitLocker password. In this case, if I'm not fast enough, it will shut down the computer.
The second is my work laptop, which I usually expect to reboot or otherwise am around when it ends up there, in which case I'll usually type in the PIN quickly enough. However, I expect it to have a similar behavior as the first case, although I haven't tried.
But the reason I know this happens, is that I once left this PC attached to my 32" screen next to my bed, and it woke me up at night. I just went and forcibly shut off the thing.
The command in question is ```bcdedit /set {bootmgr} bootshutdowndisabled 1```.
https://www.tenforums.com/antivirus-firewalls-system-securit...
For the best part of a decade the first thing I do on any mobile device I touch is disable wake calls in the power plan settings. Learned it the hard way after the T420 woke me up multiple times per night with loud beeps...
Technically true, but not enough for you to notice.
Modern SSDs have drive write lifetimes in the high hundreds of TB of writes.
If you had 128GB of memory in your laptop, writing that down to disk isn't going to consume much of that write lifetime.
Samsung warranties their 990 Pro SSD at 600TBW for 1TB, 1200TBW on 2TB, and 2400TBW on 4TB.
So, lets assume you've got a laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. If you hibernate it 3x per day. After 10 years you'll have used 350TB of your writes.
(32GB * 3) * 365.25d * 10y = 350.64TB
I think your SSD will handle it just fine. :)
I think this is less and less true as time goes on. I have a laptop from 5 ish years ago I still use and it's actually pretty fast.
And, even so, it's not like the ONLY wear on your SSD is the hibernation. So this 5 year figure, I'm not sure it's right. I think, maybe if you're someone who stresses your hard drives a lot (maybe you work with photography or videography?) hibernation might make an impactful difference.
For those with heavy I/O workloads, they likely have higher-grade or larger SSDs with a higher TBW rating.
Additionally, TBW isn’t a hard limit and can often be exceeded, with some drives lasting beyond 200%.
For most users, TBW won’t be an issue, and other components are more likely to fail before the drive wears out.
Tbh all my Apple laptops, including the piece of shit one with the emoji keyboard, have had no problem sleeping.
Ofc that's on mac os, not sure what they offer if you install linux or windows.
More than once I went on a train ride to the office, having clicked "Suspend" in the main menu and watching the screen go black before placing the laptop in my bag, just to find out the battery was completely drained and the 2019 MBP so hot that it not just required cooling down before it would power up again but also hot enough to fry an egg - an IR thermometer showed 70 °C!
If anyone knows or writes an application that could place a red warning icon in the menu bar warning me that "suspending" will not actually work, I'll be glad to exchange it for a crate of beer.
mac os is nice enough to allow applications to prevent sleep. Check "pmset -g assertions" to point out the culprit.
A couple years ago it was Chrome for me. It kept an assertion saying "WebRTC has active peer connections" on all the time. This has only lead me to have a pathological hatred for WebRTC and I turn it off in all my browsers now.
As for the dGPU, i've never had one but I do have a feeling that spells trouble, especially with these electron apps and their Helper (GPU) processes. I'm old fashioned enough to do most of my work on desktops that are plugged in and only buy lightweight laptops (13-14 inch mbpros wit no discrete GPU).
But since it's sporadic, I sometimes forget to look into Activity Monitor if I'm in a rush, and for fucks sake this is not a problem that should exist in the first place.
I mean, yes, I've had more issues back when I still used Windows, but my Apple gear costs thousands of dollars, I expect better quality.
I expect that if the system knows that my intent will not be successful (because some application locks suspend) that the option is either not available/greyed out or that I at least get a goddamn prompt "XYZ is locking suspend. <Abort attempt/Force suspend>".
As for Electron, yes, Teams is cursed in that regard (as it is in locking the dGPU), but for me it's usually Parallels, closely followed by IntelliJ that randomly messes up suspend. Neither of them are Electron.
Tbh I don't understand why an OS would allow applications to prevent sleep either, but you mentioned MS Teams and I mentioned Google :)
I don't think IntelliJ ever prevented sleep for me, but I mostly used the Android Studio flavor. I've caught it using up all my ram though if i left it on for weeks.
As for Parallels, I've never tried to close a laptop with a running VM on it. I don't know why, but I always suspend the VMs manually (from the Parallels menu for example) if i use them.
I’m curious how well Asahi linux works with standby on a Apple Silicon Mac.
This seems to have been fixed for a while now (say a year or so), but when the Intel machine was new, Windows would sometimes not wake up from sleep, or if did, the screen would be garbled.
The AMD still has an issue where Windows will "unexpectedly shutdown" (according to the event log) during modern standby. This happens every single time I leave it on standby during the night. This is an almost four-year-old machine by now, not some brand-spanking-new thing, which works otherwise perfectly, especially on Linux.
I think most people intend their laptop to retain it’s charge when they close the lid and standby used to do this, but on windows machines, it really doesn’t anymore.
It should really write all the ram to hd after a short period of time in your backpack instead of quickly depleting the battery.
In the default config on my machine, it actually starts to hibernate if it's asleep and unplugged for a while. Don't know what the delay is.
I’ve not tried it long but from my short experience, it works well.
Btw, Asahi is actually really easy to install if you are curious. Everything is done/installed from macOS including shrinking your macOS partition. And uninstalling it is as simple as removing the partition from Disk Manager and growing back your macOS partition.
All you need is some disk space and, one command line to copy paste and about 20 minutes.
And it works really well overall. It have everything to be a daily driver (including graphics acceleration) except external display support and TouchID. But both of those issues are being worked on.
But overall, I was pretty impressed by Fedora Asahi. I was expecting a clunky experience with hacks and bugs everywhere but I'm now actually expecting to use it as my daily driver as soon as possible.
Like, there are those things (USB-C, external display, Touch ID) that doesn't work at all but everything else works wonderfully. Even the audio is as good as on macOS (thanks to the specially built audio driver) which iirc, have never been the case on Intel macs (yes, audio works on intel but the sound is better on macOS because Apple have a special driver that is able to shortly and safely overdrive the speakers to get better sound - and asahi replicated this driver).
So also acquiring a new laptop is now a pain in the ass... good to know.
The previous Macbook Air 11 also was great for sleep/wake. The Windows 7 Thinkpad before that was ok but took like 30 seconds to restart from sleep and would crash sometimes.
I’d like to do this, as I find a laptop that cannot last in sleep for at least a week ill-suited for my needs. Where do I go to figure out if my next laptop supports proper sleep?
Hibernate = S4
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_an...
Do you get all your workspace back exactly like it was before, after a shutdown and turn on again ?
There’s something breathtakingly arrogant about that
"Breathtakingly arrogant" is pretty much exactly what I would think of if someone asked me to describe Microsoft in 2 words.
Microsoft decides for you how you would like to use your computer. If you don't agree, use Linux. Or Mac, but Apple is really no better than Microsoft with regard to arrogance.
Maybe I could look past this sleep nonsense if their super cool new sleep actually worked. But it just doesn't, instead it cooks your laptop 10% of the time and it you open it up and it's dead.
The fact that they are pushing S3 as "Linux Sleep" or "Legacy Sleep" and S0ix as "modern sleep" is absolutely not innocent from a marketing perspective.
We ought to reverse Uno this non-sense. Perhaps the Linux Foundation and all the distro development teams out there should start calling S3 _True_Sleep_™ in all their official communication.
Moved to Apple Silicon in 2021 after my Dell Precision cooked itself (and my lunch!) to death in my bag on a train. No issues since.
The core issue is that the firmware in most laptops is just ancient garbage and nobody seems to really care about it. Apple has full ownership over their own firmware so it's less of an issue for them (though it still has issues). But most chip manufacturers servicing the wintel laptop market treat software as an afterthought. They aren't very good at it and they just put in the minimum effort that they can get away with. So, it's all proprietary, poorly designed, decades old, etc. If it breaks they bang on it until it sort of works again (windows only).
Laptop makers then make things worse by just buying a lot of cheap components. Synaptic seems popular for touch pads, for example. My Samsung has one. It's not good. I've actually never come across anything made by them that wasn't garbage.
With Linux slowly creeping up in market share on desktops, it's something that could start changing. Most Linux users are very selective in what they buy and there are certain brands that are just so hopeless that people actively avoid them. Lenovo bought a good reputation from IBM when they acquired their laptop division. That's ages ago but they sort of nurtured that and it's probably helped a lot. It's not rocket science to just make sure things work on Linux.
My work laptop is a macbook. The hardware is just miles ahead of the competition. It's just not even close. Everything else is a major downgrade. I bought that Samsung to replace a mac because I was waiting for the M1 to come out when my old laptop died. I worked on that thing for half a year. Going back to a mac was just such major upgrade in every way possible. You forget how great they are. Software wise I'm actually fine with Linux. Everything I use is open source or available for Linux. I don't use any of the Apple software (the i* stuff). I'm there for the hardware only. If Linux support catches up, I might switch actually.
From the article,
> Traditional Sleep requires all system hardware and software components to work together. The operating system must support Sleep, as well as the hardware (e.g. CPU) and the BIOS/UEFI. According to the UEFI to Hardware Interface Standard (ACPI), this usual form of sleep is referred to as S3. S3 is a Sleep State in which all system components, except for the RAM and CPU Cache, are powered off.
I cannot imagine what the benefit of receiving notifications and other information like this on a Windows system would be. As far as I know, very, very few apps are programmed for the native "App" development flow (or even to use the notifications api) as opposed to "desktop" apps, and the number only gets smaller as you go into long tail enterprise apps. Perhaps this was designed for Outlook, but I think the use case is dubious.
Of course, there are millions of laptops in the wild, many of which are undoubtedly used by the people who work on Windows. Every time I find the laptop closed and running its fans, or find a computer in a bag that is slightly warm near the CPU (expected behaviour of working Modern Standby), I wonder whether it's just my computer or if it's every single one of them out there. Do people just accept that their computer has to be either shut down or will have an unknown amount of remaining power? It seems like there would have been a huge push to get this fixed if it was really broken, but I rarely hear users talking about it.
Of course I do wonder whether with the advent of the new Qualcomm ARM CPUs, whether they have finally managed to get Modern Standby to be a good clone of what Android devices do...
Why is this important, or even something to consider? The only thing that's important with Windows and features in it is whether something delivers value to Microsoft.
Oh, sweet summer child. I sometimes use Windows on my work machine, complete with the "new" Teams and "new" Outlook. For some reason, these need a while to update when I wake my machine from sleep, even though it usually sleeps connected to power, with a network cord plugged in and in range of Wi-Fi. Teams, in particular, will say it's offline for a few minutes, even though I can browse the web as soon as the box actually becomes interactive.
The computer actually does something while asleep, judging by how hot it gets. But, as you say, it's really not clear what. It will do this even though Defender is deactivated (we have some other handbrake at work which doesn't do a full system scan on its own) and the system is fully up-to-date.
Why do you think it was created to deliver value to the customer?
It is merely a reason for Microsoft to spy^Hextract value from a customer even when the PC is sleeping. Like humans, laptop spend a third of their life in sleep mode and it would be nice to monetise that time, multiplied by a couple billion users.
I think it is clear that the goal of the Windows division is to milk every user for all their worth. By the time they are done, laptops will be an obsolete product and Microsoft doesn't really want to support Windows 20 more years.
Modern standby is making my laptop unpredictable, and that is very inconvenient for me
How is this the case? Suspend to/from RAM on Linux wakes up in less than a second in my experience. Which makes sense, because everything is still in RAM and systemd doesn't need to do a bunch of work to get everything back online. Maybe Windows has a weird implementation of S3?
My shiny new work laptop without S3 wakes up in the same time, and then says "Battery critically low, shutting down."
This is not a convenience, it's insubordination. I told it to sleep, and it didn't.
But you know what's really insane? When the new work laptop is just sitting there with the screen locked and I walk up and hit a key, it takes longer to just display the password box than the 10 year old Thinkpad takes to wake up from S3 and display the password box. (Ok, it's an unfair comparison, Windows vs Linux, but still...)
And S3 is basically «instant».
So I don't see much point in S2Idle/S0ix.
I guess the value is for enterprise users because the ecosystem is so bad.
When I return from sleep on my laptop, my VPN is disconnected and can't reconnect itself automatically as I need to go through the auth + 2FA phase. I am also logged of all Azure AD authenticated web apps and Microsoft web apps like Teams and Outlook are so bad they don't automatically sign in back when you have signed on on other Azure AD resources.
I haven't started my corporate laptop on the original windows 10 for years so I can't compare but I imagine a "modern standby" would have some keepalive on the VPN connections and apps like teams so they don't sign you out?
But in the end this is kind of useless on those Dell laptops because it drains the battery so fast and they have such a low battery life that you just want to shut them down if they are not connected to their docking statino. I guess it serves the people who are on-prem and close the lid to go from one meeting room to another.
But when I was working on-prem I would just configure it to just lock the laptop and would use the sleep shortcut to put the laptop to a normal sleep. Apparently most people were too dumb to figure that out and would walk between their desk and the meeting room awkwardly with the lid up, I can't believe they have managers roles or are even allowed to work in the IT industry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Articles like these make me afraid that the damn thing will break eventually and I'll have to spend exorbitants amounts of money on something like a Framework to get a usable Linux experience.
Not to mention that having a fake-off state like S0ix is a golden ticket for covert surveillance (like our phones don't do enough for the gestapo). I don't think anybody cares about Cortana, even less so on a suspended laptop. The notifications and update angle is really suspicious as well.
The community.frame.work forum has reports from people running newer boards so you don't have to guess before buying.
That is just peak level stupidity. I sometimes boot into Windows, and every time Windows Update runs, the fans are on high, my system is taken hostage ("Do not turn off your computer - updates ready 100%" - showing for 15 minutes), and there is nothing I can do about it.
Compared to this, an `apt upgrade` is basically an instant action (only kernel updates take a bit longer). Too bad Ubuntu is trying to break that with snap, but it is still a minor inconvenience.
The major H1/H2 releases take a bit longer, up to 15 minutes. But not stuck at 100%.
Yeah right, implying everyone should get specified hardware to have a decent user experience definitely seem to be making sense.
The same cannot be said about Windows.
At the moment, the user cannot choose, but is forced to be always "on".
When it is working, S3 sleep covers my needs perfectly. And it is not about email updates. I don't want my laptop to do anything while in sleep. It's that simple.
Sure, S0 on Windows makes your laptop turn on in your bag for impossible-to-disable updates, causing it to overheat or the battery to run down. And no laptops on the market will S0 on Linux without running down the battery in less than 24 hours.
Why should hardware vendors mollycoddle users who make the foolish decision to use either Windows or Linux?
[1] - https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/faq-mode...
EDIT: Added source cited in the article
I do. I had a few poor experiences with laptops accidentally turning on while in the bag between 1995 and 2010.
After the last time, in 2010, when the thing started beeping due to overheating, I started the habit of shutting down/hibernating completely instead of just closing the lid and popping it into the bag.
What an awful laptop.
Don't conclude from your own carelessness to others. Even just one person shutting down their laptop will instantly disprove your claim, that "nobody does XYZ". So you will basically almost always be wrong with such a statement/claim.
In the past where a computer would be connected to the corporate network all the time you could usually get Wake-on-LAN to work so you could boot computers at night to apply updates and ensure that users weren't waiting around forever. With laptops and people working remotely you need a new way to ensure that the bulk of the updates happen when they won't interfere with users trying to work - this is the solution.
Microsoft may well tout additional potential benefits, but that's more about selling it to consumers so they don't complain about changes as much.
And, of course, some manufacturers do a better job than others at implementing this. --I haven't had a problem with any of my Lenovo laptops or even the Surface laptop. Dell, on the other hand, doesn't seem to implement it well at all.
I believe iOS is capable of flushing most cleartext data on suspend until the passcode is reentered, so suspend should be as good as shutdown; I don’t know if macOS can do it. On desktop Linux it’s theoretically possible with systemd-homed, but in practice that needs desktop-environment support that’s as far as I know does not exist, so shutting down is more secure. I can’t remember anything about Android either way except for some features for disabling the USB port in some alternative firmware.
On Windows with a typical TPM-only setup, powering off is probably just as bad as suspending, because just powering the machine back on is enough for it to helpfully unlock everything. If you do need to enter a BitLocker passphrase at boot, then you’re in the same situation as typical desktop Linux, so powering off is more secure.
"enterprise customers" have proper security policies and tooling to enforce them in place.
My employer has a "small" utility that periodically checks for version of installed software and will warn me if I don't install the necessary updates. If I don't install updates for more then x days I'm cut off every network access to the corporate network, and I must first install the updates and then ask my manager to let me back in the corporate network (again, there's automated tooling for that).
So this push for "always on" bullshit is not what enterprises asked for.
Microsoft wants mac/ios/android-like experience, but just can't deliver such thing due to hardware fragmentation.
I never understood why microsoft doesn't go full apple and only allows certain top-tier features on surface laptops or other hardware they own from top to bottom.
If you're serious about software you can't underrate the role of hardware: Apple has clearly got this incredibly right, and it's a fundamental part of their value proposition.
I guess Microsoft should go full-apple and allow microsoft windows ONLY on microsoft hardware?
But you don't want that to happen when your laptop is in your backpack.
It is bonkers that Microsoft and manufacturers both would remove the ability for the users to decide it is not a good idea to have an OS running. It effectively forces anyone to shutdown completely their laptops.
And any issues related to applying updates after downloading them has nothing to do with this issue.
> That is just peak level stupidity.
It also violates the core idea of sleep mode: Keep the current state of my computer intact until I continue working. If a windows update forces a reboot, then that computer state will be lost.
basically you don't block any bandwidth while a user is using the computer and instead when they are not
also you download slower (less bandwidth) in the background because you have much more time available to download it (like e.g. the whole night)
this feature is also only about downloads, that windows tends to force apply updates once they are downloaded is a different unrelated issue altogether
so theoretically especially for laptops which are only used idk. 1-2h max a day for people with not so fast internet this could be grate
could because it isn't, due to implementation details
e.g. you would only want to run this if you are: plugged in (power), the internet is reliable (at least as reliable as "normally" for any given network) etc.
but AFIK it doesn't really detect changes in power status, doesn't detect bad natwork conditions (which can lead to increased power use), and probably doesn't use "intentional slow" download either
you also can't opt out
so yeah it seems shit with how it's implemented -- but the idea by itself isn't bad
Whoever fixes this first will make a lot of money.
Edit: SteamDeck is also very good at this and that's why I'm sticking to it for handheld gaming.
edit: maybe not the specific S3 sleep problem but a general inability to sleep correctly
On my personal laptops the cause could be all the accumulated junk I installed. Apple's refusal to support legacy software may help out since it seems the old software doesn't want to run on new hardware.
I've never had any issues with entering my password/doing TouchID to unlock the laptop as soon as I've opened the lid.
This isn’t something to be proud of. It means that you’re not applying the regularly-released security updates.
macOS is spectacularly good at restoring state on reboot. It’s like it never happened.
Update your software.
Numerous minor updates have screwed up things for me, particularly with some applications I rely on. I will usually lag 2-3 patches behind and wait for other people to suffer first and confirm what I use is stable. I am still on Sonoma / 14.5 at the moment.
Incidentally I actually have a Mac Pro here which is running Monterey which hasn't been patched for about 9 months. The universe has not and will not be imploding any time soon.
Everyone forgets the "availability" bit of security.
I don't disagree, but also...
I find it a bit surprising that this is still a thing. Why is there ever a time when I _must_ reboot? Is it just that mainstream kernels were designed at a time when people had lower expectations around this sort of thing, and now it's too hard to evolve their designs toward something that would allow for zero-downtime patching in ~all cases?
Other examples that make me wonder if it's mostly because people haven't demanded better:
- Enormous updates for all kinds of things (gigabytes for a bug fix release) because differential updates aren't pervasive. - Windows updates where a huge amount of work is done during the "rebooting" phase (why can't most of this be done before reboot?) - Absolutely atrocious power management on pretty much anything that's not a MacBook, and even not perfect on those.
I never thought we'd have flying cars by now, but if you asked me a decade ago to predict the future of operating systems... it wouldn't be this.
Note that security updates are independent of the OS updates (or should be). There is no real excuse of forcing a user upgrade an OS version.
Otherwise under personal use/control macbooks are great, though, in not forcing you do updates of annoy you to death about them.
I've my own ritual for preparing myself for the "I am done" phase. Doing the last commits, writing down a few sentences on what should I do when I go back to work and closing the lid.
The solution happened to be unplug and replug for the first issue, and force reboot for the second. I've enough people having issues with external displays that I don't think it's an isolated problem.
For comparison a Surface Pro failing to go to sleep or getting hot in the bag hasn't happened to me in 2 years of owning these machines. It might surely happen, but it's far from a regular occurrence I think.
I got woken up in the night a couple of times because of my macbook doing that.
This have never happened with any other laptop I've had.
On paper modernizing S3 made even sense since getting all the system components to work nicely with S3 is not an easy task. What wasn't thought off is that handling the same task in modern standby generally isn't easier.
Steve Jobs had an insight that a computer was just another household appliance
But it was built by engineers who came from the homebrew world
This is a great example of how our appliance has gotten worse, even though it’s on hardware that is 1000x the throughput, and we’ve lost the ability to configure it too
Here's the thing: this self-serving behaviour from Microsoft will eventually kill someone, or quite possibly a large number of people. It's just a matter of time until a high-powered laptop does this in someone's luggage on a plane, catches fire, and then there will be congressional investigations like we had with the Boeing 737 MCAS system.
In both cases near-monopoly companies are gambling with peoples' lives to meet some internal KPI that in the grand scheme of things just doesn't matter... but it does to some manager's bonus, so you see... people are going to have to die.
„old” and „legacy” hardware 8-10 years ago was fighting with the tasks and you could still put laptop on your legs. Funny enough yesterday I went into this sleep stuff, because my 5yo Dell battery drained while being „shut down” after 1.5 weeks and while charging I tried to run 2 tabs in browser to look for fix and my legs burned - so I had to put it diagonally on the table to cool down.
We have order of magnitude faster hardware capable of doing order of magnitude less things.