Do not leave XPS laptop in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag | Hacker News Reader

standby mode when placed in a bag

dell.com

1,080 pointsbestouff879 comments

I stopped using my Microsoft Surface Pro because it had the same issues. It's a clusterfuck of bad design decisions at Microsoft, the most offensive one being that they prioritize the execution of their scheduled spyware upload (telemetry) over honoring the agreement with the user that a sleeping PC will remain asleep unless the user takes action. It'll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone. Plus as described here, many Windows 10 laptops will either burn themselves, or the battery will be empty whenever you need em.

Ah, must be why I've never had any issues with my xps running Linux.

Yeah because if anything, Linux is definitely known for great power management on laptops

Typically linux users (like myself) enable S3 sleep mode, which does exactly what most folks expect it to (sleep until a user action is taken). It's rock solid and I've never had a problem with it in ~8 years.

While there is a BIOS hack to supposedly do that on an XPS 9500/9510, I've yet to see anyone get it to work. I am typing this comment on a 9500 that is mostly great with Linux. Its battery life is subpar though. I'm limited to S2 Idle or deep sleep.

Yes that part works, the issue is when you wake up the laptop, half the system is broken.

Sleep and wake up have worked flawlessly for me across many machines over the years.

What are you referring to in particular? I've never had anything be broken, in 15 years of exclusive Linux use.

Though I don't share the confidence half this thread has that my experiences are universal, so I'm curious what you're referring to that I've managed to avoid.

The ability to configure the options and not have every interaction tracked does make Linux the best option. However unpopular that may be.

The Dell with Linux out of the box had cooling issues and a high-pitched fan. Sure the cores would be disabled to deal with the power issues, which supports your point.

I've been using linux on laptops for years and I have no idea what you are talking about.

The level of "idle vs suspend to RAM vs Deep Hibernate (suspend to disk)" is noted by "S" levels.

So the higher the S number the lower the energy usage? Or vice versa?

Modern/Connected Standby is S0ix, which goes out of that convention.

Are you possibly referring to something that isn't automatic detection of hardware features? I've been on Linux laptops for 13 years but almost always on something shipped by the vendor, and I've never had these problems of going to sleep or bad power management that I hear about from HN comments.

This was the reason I returned my Surface Book 2 back in 2018. I got it out of my laptop bag one day and burnt my fingers it was so hot. Fans at 100% and it was sitting at 99C just one degree away from shutdown.

That plus a whole host of annoying software bugs with the detachable design, keyboard backlight not working until I reboot, etc. was just a horrible experience so ended up getting a refund and buying a MacBook Pro when the 2018 models came out. Sure it has the crappy butterfly keyboard but three years later and that MacBook Pro is still a fantastic machine that I haven't had a single issue with. Cost the same as the Surface Book 2 as well.

The new Surface Laptop Studio looks interesting but I am very hesitant to buy Microsoft hardware again. It looks nice but is plagued with issues even today from what friends and colleagues tell me. Real shame. Hopefully things are better with the new models announced this week but I will be sitting back and waiting a few months to see how they are in the real world rather than a 3 day review.

> It'll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone.

That reminds me of last time I upgraded my mac by doing the transfer from one machine to the other. When the new mac booted for the first time, it had the same unsaved documents I had open on the old one. Things have come a long way.

Yes, it usually works on Mac. And then you get used to it working, which makes it even more frustrating when it doesn't work anymore ^^

Both proud and embarrassed to say I've had 150+ open Safari tabs persisting across three Mac laptops and five years of OS updates.

This is the literal reason I switched to OSX. I dislike the impractical design of Macbooks - horrible connectivity and no way to swap batteries.

However the combination of 15 hrs battery life + closing the lid and it not melting a hole in my bag trumps any negatives.

Same sentiment, and that's how I found Linux. I've now made it a solemn vow to convert every daily driver I have to dual-boot Win/Linux when it's a >100GB HD.

My XPS 13 on Ubuntu while sleping randomly turns on in my backpack and tries to melt a hole/burns the battery to 0. So I think at least SOME of it might be hardware related.

The takeaway from this thread is that there is no platform safe from this issue.

The probability of the issue happening seems to be meaningfully far less on certain operating systems than others.

I don't see how you can possibly make any meaningful conclusions about relative probability from this thread.

It is not from this thread, but my experience over the last 15 to 20 years. I have seen lots and lots of people, including myself, close MacBook lids, toss it in a bag, and start walking. But I do not see that with non MacBooks. It was so notable to me that it led me to decide to look into switching to MacBook Airs.

And you believe your experience is statistically significant.

n=1, but we still weight it x20 because we have the most data on it.

I'm really exhausted by this trend of people adding the word "probability" to their argument because they think it makes it stronger. Just no.

*except Macs. I daily drive my desktop with Linux and occasionally game with Windows (it’s set up to be my driver as well with WSL2, but that happens rarely). I’ll only use Mac laptops. I’ve screwed around with others, but for about 18 years they have been the only ones that have been reliable, with good build quality, and no molten backpacks yet.

There are some people reporting problems with Macs on this thread...

What is bad, because if there were one platform that would avoid this problem it would be Macs. But anyway, my phone does that once in a while too... Phones also shouldn't do it.

It's not even a hard problem to solve. There is a single piece of code that wakes a device up, you just have to not call it everywhere. If you don't control all the code, just require some kind of permission, and don't go granting it to the team that writes the system updater.

I've had nothing but problems with Apple's "Power Nap" functionality. I remember three discrete issues with my 2014 MBP (Quartz would randomly crash out of naps when connected to external displays, the topcase frequently felt mysteriously warm and my media controls would freak out forcing me to close spotify/firefox before closing it) Ironically, the only time I've seen it behaving as-intended was when I had my T460p running MacOS with photo analysis disabled. I'm guessing it's an ACPI issue, since Apple's track record with the technology is shaky.

I've had the opposite experience with Macbooks. WiFi randomly dropping out, battery dying overnight while the laptop is closed, external display settings not being persisted, randomly switching from my external microphone to the built-in one halfway through a call... Sometimes reading through these threads I feel like the only person in the world who has somehow had three faulty Macbooks in a row.

I've now had three generations of XPS 13 with Ubuntu. They're not perfect (the battery drains over 3 or 4 days instead of overnight) but overall my experience has been much better.

Should airplanes forbid PC laptops?

It’s more serious than laptops committing suicide in bags. It’s, anything with a high-energy battery can short itself and cause a fire. Worse, it could be malware or hardware. At this point I am surprised the vulnerability hasn’t been used by anyone.

Airplanes have bags/boxes to throw li-ion batteries into and extinguish any particular fire.

The law is that you can only bring aboard Li-ion batteries of size 100 watt-hrs or smaller on any airplane (https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...).

I think the airline crews are confident they can handle 100 watt-hours worth of burning, but no more than that!

You can't extinguish a lithium ion battery fire by smothering it. The fire creates its own oxygen. You can contain the fire, and you can immerse it in enough water that it cools below the burning temperature and shorts out through the water.

https://youtu.be/oa_yao1DC1U

https://youtu.be/LCFsmHLDuyg

I'm not sure if they are smothering the fire. The strategy seems like it's just a safe place to keep the fire until later.

You won't have buckets and buckets of water on an airplane. You need a solution to safely contain the fire and keep the passengers safe.

but very easily fixed as written above :)

Same here on an XPS 15, damn thing was so hot I was worried about it catching fire.

As I understood it, it's an ACPI configuration, more or less 'forced' by Microsoft, to ensure this cool new S0 is the default. See [0] [1] and [2]. The fix/work-around is to tell the kernel to not do that, and just use traditional S3 sleep.

Adding `mem_sleep_default=deep` to your kernel cmdline should fix it. Been doing this on my XPS13 for 3 years now and it's fine.

[0] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199689

[1] https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-13-9370-battery-drain...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/8b6eci/xp_13_9370_bat...

Dell has "fixed" that problem by disabling S3 sleep on certain laptops. Not even kidding, the ACPI tables don't have S3 sleep as an option and it's not even some matter of OSI string trickery either.

S3 is no longer available on newer XPS notebooks (e.g. 9310). S0ix works fine with Linux but I've found it typically requires tweaking and testing.

dmesg | grep ACPI | grep supports [ 0.193967] ACPI: (supports S0 S4 S5)

sudo cat /sys/power/mem_sleep [s2idle]

https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-li...

https://01.org/blogs/rzhang/2015/best-practice-debug-linux-s...

I used to disable all ACPI signals (keys and lid) for exactly this reason on my Macbook 2015 running linux.

Not the most comfortable, as you have to manage sleep manually, but definitely the safest.

Ah right, Linux, the platform where suspend and resume doesn't even work and hibernation is a mess.

AMD https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-S2id...

s2idle is broken and I have an AMD thinkpad with deep sleep and even that doesn't suspend 80% of the time.

Intel (search for 'deep' and 's2idle') https://community.frame.work/t/ubuntu-21-04-on-the-framework...

I already know the replies I might get but just wanted to get this out there. My laptop is now on 24x7 because I don't know if it will suspend or completely freeze.

This has been my experience as well, with a fairly wide variety of nixes/bsds/etc and a half a dozen different machines.

Now I just disable it completely and tell it to shut down when I close the lid, and wait like 15s. If the fans and lights don't stop "soon", I know it's having problems turning off. It's much better than the random freezes, or boiling alive in a backpack before draining all battery power.

I never understood why I should be hibernating instead of suspending so I can't talk about that - but I haven't seen a laptop unable to suspend for years. That could be luck and not buying laptops with terrible linux support but I wouldn't paint the situation as this tragic.

The experience out of the box is still crap because the ACPI signals from the hardware are often a complete mess - but disabling most of them generally works.

> and not buying laptops with terrible linux support but I wouldn't paint the situation as this tragic.

Please tell me the name of a laptop which has excellent support for Linux. At this point, I'm ready to go out of my way to spend more money than I can afford if that gets me excellent Linux compatibility.

I know, for a fact, that AMD based ThinkPads don't qualify. The Intel based FrameWork laptop has issues with suspend resume as well.

I have a Thinkpad X270, it has an Intel CPU. Never had any problems with suspend/resume on Linux.

I obviously won't buy a 5 year old laptop. I guess I should change my question to "Are there any laptops released within the past year that have excellent Linux compatibility?" Because from what I've read on forums, suspend resume doesn't work for a lot of people and the scenario keeps changing from one Linux version to the other.

I can't confirm my experience is excellent but my partner's 2021 Acer Spin Pro 5 is on par with various Lenovo laptops (I was surprised when it mostly just worked) and better than Asus mobo desktops that I have used.

Dell XPS 9360

Not usable for me because it needs fractional scaling.

Linux has reliable sleep on many more laptop models than mac os. But the rule is that you need to buy known good hardware that supports Linux to have a frictionless experience. (Yes this means you often have to buy something that's been on the market for a bit of time already.) Anecdotally I've had less sleep problems than mac-using coworkers, over a long time and many laptops.

> you need to buy known good hardware

What is this "known good hardware"?

I was thinking of somehow getting my hands on the FrameWork laptop since everyone and their mother keep singing praises about it but going through its forums makes it clear that it also doesn't do suspend and resume reliably.

I've already seen plenty of people reporting that their AMD laptops don't do suspend resume and break with every new kernel release. I assumed Intel would be better but reading about the same issue on FrameWork forums isn't encouraging at all.

One way to know is reports on the web like you are already reading. Business ThinkPads with integrated GPUs tend to have many good models, for one concrete direction if you haven't found a starting point yet. Asking your sales rep, certifications, trying a live USB stick of your preferred distro at a friend/coworker/shop/it-dept owned machine can work too.

In my experience, "known good hardware" is ">2-year-old hardware" when it comes to Linux.

But, I'm a bit cheap, and I treat optimizing older tech as a challenge, so I think I've just declared myself both an outlier in general and a stereotypical Linux user.

My AMD Thinkpad was released a little over 2 years ago and it still has serious flaws. And if the AMD gitlab bug tracker and bug reports on forums are anything to go by, I'm not optimistic about those flaws going away in the future.

I have no idea if the situation is just as bad on Intel.

> What is this "known good hardware"?

Any hardware that ships with Linux, for a start. For another, anything whose quirks are documented on a popular community site (e.g., the Arch Linux Wiki).

It's important to choose a distro release a little bit newer than the hardware.

The Framework is brand new and doesn't ship with Linux, so I wouldn't expect it to be a trouble-free experience.

Be careful. My Macbook Pro cooked it's display twice. Some program made it not go to sleep when I closed the lid, I put it in my backpack, and it overheated the display so much that I had yellow-brownish spots (which followed gravity over time). No way to check if it's sleeping when the lid is closed, because reasons...

We have a few users that leave clamshell mode while working at home and the past year never opened their laptops. Same thing. Permanent heat stain on the display in the form of the keyboard. Granted that's more than just sleeping issues, but it's definitely something that happens.

I once had told Caffeine not to sleep my 2014 MBPr when the lid was shut and later put it in my backpack.

Why the frak doesn’t the laptop have an over temp shutdown feature? iPhones so, trying leaving one in the sun for a bit.

Caffeine shouldn't prevent it from sleeping anymore anymore unless you have an HDMI plugged in it.

Yes and Macs have worked like that since the PPC days. Display closed + no external display connected = sleep. Removing said display will also make it sleep.

I guess it's a bug or some monitoring service that crashed.

Perhaps it was Amphetamine with the relevant setting to prevent sleep with built-in display closed.

Any fullscreen apps using the GPU will prevent a MacBook from sleeping when the lid is closed. Games, YouTube, even some GPU-heavy apps can prevent it from sleeping.

I always assumed those were the result of my cycling backpack putting too much pressure on the screen. It's basically bow-like structure to keep the bag off my back.

I do have my MacBooks cooking themselves in my backpack every so often too.

Basically, every MacBook's I had in the past > 10 years ended with that issue.

Mystery solved!

What’s the name of the backpack btw? Been looking for something like this

I can confirm that this is the issue. I have little white spots on the display, and they appear during my motorcycle trips, when my luggage is pushing against the display. I got a fresh one from the latest trip. Armoured cases are not nearly as armoured as they should be.

I really miss the "snoring" light that Macbooks used to have, though more to tell if the computer is actually waking up.

I really don't get why they left the light off them. It's not something that takes any space at all and they can even make it invisible when off with their micro holes like they did with the old Bluetooth keyboard.

Sometimes it seems Apple is just minimalist for the sake of it. Because this is really a useful feature.

I doubt lasering those holes is particularly cheap, i.e. likely much (much) more than the cost of a big hole with an LED.

But I do very much like them, and would happily pay a bit to get it back.

They could manage it in a $80 keyboard when that tech was new and probably more expensive, I'd think they could do it in a $1500 laptop :)

And a hole with a plastic insert would be fine for me too. It wouldn't be as minimalist but not doing it at all is much worse IMO.

Membrane keyboards are so incredibly common and simple to make that I'd be willing to bet they make dramatically more profit on that keyboard than on a $1500 laptop (proportional to price). Even after accounting for all the wasted R&D and refunds and repairs spent denying problems with their butterfly mechanism.

So kinda yes... but also kinda no, I don't think that really supports a claim that it's cheap enough to do everywhere.

But yeah, I'd totally be fine with an LED glued into a hole. The indicator is the important part, and it's a shame that it's gone.

I wouldn't be surprised if they feel like macbooks are so reliable that sort of feedback isn't even necessary

This happened to my iPhone 1 too. Caused a really ugly burn in the display :'(

Of course iOS wasn't as stable as it is now.. I don't think this will still happen.

I’ve had this issue with my work Mac not sleeping: I’ve always hypothesized it’s something to do with the provisioning of the machine, because it’s the only Mac I’ve ever had this problem with.

Is there a way to find out what app is guilty?

Just make sure you close Outlook before you close your lid. Not that Outlook is a good choice for mail, but corporations seem to like it, but at least in my experience, it somehow signals Mac OS to drain the battery.

Same, I was in university and kept showing up to class with my Dell Inspiron having killed it's own battery in my bag regardless how carefully I put it into sleep/hibernate.

Or I'd find it nearly dead and burning hot, fans spun up wildly, in the process of cooking it's own motherboard.

It heat suicided itself through 2 motherboards during the 1 year warranty.

I have my complaints about MacBooks, but at least I had a laptop I could count on being reliable and ready to work when I showed up to class every day.

I couldn't trust the Dell, making it absolutely worthless.

The best thing with Dell is when you've shut it down properly, but it somehow finds a way to turn itself back on in your bag. Then when you get home your bag is 50c and battery dead.

"Not melting a hole"

Ha! While not related to the bag issue, I had a 15" MBP literally catch fire in my bed while I was asleep.

I fell asleep wat hing Netflix or some such and the macbook caught fire and woke me up.

It was in the recall batch for batteries at that time.

I took it to apple flagship SF store.

They had the FN machine for two months then came back and said that at some point the moisture sensor went off and due to this reason they would not honor the battery recall or address the fact it caught on fire and the "apologized" for the potential "safety hazaard"

They told me my option was to buy a new one, or take it to a 3ed party repair place and have it repaired for more than the machine was worth.

I haven't bought another mac since, and I have switched from iPhones entirely, even though I have had an iPhone since day one.

Were you binge watching "Halt and Catch Fire"?

Ironically, that was about the same time it came out...

Did you say that water was the reason the fire didn’t spread? If so, I’d love to hear how they “proved” it got wet before the fire started.

Forget the overheating — the fact that Macs will save all your work when shutting down, and will refuse to shut down if this is not possible (for instance if some app that doesn’t support autosave (MS office) has unsaved work, or if there are terminal jobs running). Can’t imagine how anyone tolerates their computer just obliterating their work.

So just like Windows since... 7? Or something like that.

I can guarantee you that a Mac will still shut down when its battery is empty. Unfortunately Apple hasn't yet cracked unlimited power.

Macs sleep on low battery, then hibernate RAM contents to disk when really really empty. You never lose data.

Right, so the same as Windows.

A common theme I've noticed with the most ardent mac fans is they haven't used a windows machine since windows 95 and seem to think osx has all these magic features windows users are missing out on.

I use mac and windows daily, and they both have similar amounts of annoying niggling features.

I've used Windows in its most recent Version on a high-end Dell issued by my company and can confirm all reports here about losing data and overheating. The Macbook simply works out of box but i can't get the Windows Machine to work in a sane way without 50/50 chance of losing all battery or data after closing the lid...

I have noticed the same thing with Mac fans. Another meme from the past which needs to die is that Mac has better user interface. There are so many annoying and missing UI issues in Mac and dare I say Windows has better UI for some aspects of the OS than Mac.

Yeah mac is a mixed bag, eg. preview is awesome, finder absolutely sucks.

Unless it wakes for some weird reason, or does auto update and blows everything away which has been the general jist of this thread

Yeah I see lots of people complaining about that. Kinda weird since I've literally never had it happen to me on any of my windows machines.

Windows will routinely shut itself down to do updates and obliterate things that have not saved.

> I can guarantee you that a Mac will still shut down when its battery is empty.

Macs "safe sleep" --- when they sleep, they save a hibernation/ram state too. So if the battery is depleted, they still do not shut down.

I'm probably going back to MacOS after my current Windows 10 machine, because too many annoyances have shown up (and now ESC keys exist again).

Made me think about a system we have to enter notes in at work. It'll kick you out with 10 minutes of inactivity. But it won't tell you it's kicked you out. You just go to save your notes and it puts you to a login screen, discarding everything you've typed.

That would cause me to edit my notes in notepad and then copy past them when done.

You're kidding right? I hate that behaviour of MacOS. If I told the OS to shut down/restart, I meant it. Kill everything and get on with it, I shouldn't have to babysit.

If I told it to update, I didn't mean "oh pretty please but if it's too hard don't worry about it", I meant "I know this ii. update is going to take an hour for a point release for some reason, but I'm going for a walk now - go ahead so IT gets off my back".

Also I've had many issues with my macbook overheating/discharging in my bag because I hit sleep, it looked like it was sleeping, but it was still on/woke up. Admittedly not a huge amount because of COVID but still.

Can’t you just wait two minutes for it yo cycle through all open apps and click “don’t save”/“terminate” on all of them?

But why isn't there simply a Terminate All button?

It's the power button, just force instant power off if you don't mind an integrity check at next startup!

there is, sort of, but it's got one or two extra steps (and most folks probably don't know it exists).

1. Press Cmd+Option+Escape to bring up the Force Quit menu

2. Press Cmd+A to select all running apps

3. Click the "Force Quit" Button to force quit all apps

And then it doesn’t work, so after half an hour of staring at a grey screen, you give up and hold down the power button.

Why wait at all in that case and not just hold down the power button right away?

Just killing all apps is a very hostile default for a consumer OS. You might be able to force a restart from the terminal if you really don’t care about data integrity though.

funny

I was using an iPad Pro and I thought something in the Apple Notes app was good. Poof. Never found the file after.

Unsaved work should be a concern of the app, not the OS. The app should obey the commands of the OS, and handle auto-saving on its own to keep fulfilling its duties to the user.

Apps that let you risk losing work -- from not just shutdowns but crashes and power outages - are the ones I don't tolerate. It's one of the reason I use Sublime Text for taking notes for example.

VSCode has excellent work preservation. I’ve had multiple Windows in VSCode open for months, with many “unsaved” documents open, and it always reloads everything after reboots and shutdowns.

MS Windows does the same thing with Hibernate.

Until it decides you must have this new update and reboots your machine at 2am for you

One interesting tidbit is that Macbooks will (don't know since when) start booting up if you press any key after having shut the laptop down.

That's a bummer when you want to go clean your keyboard and don't want the laptop running at the same time.

I believe this is just if it's sleeping with the lid open. If you go to Apple > Shut down... and let it complete, it will not turn back on unless you press the power button.

Nope, not anymore. This used to work for my 2013 MBP, but even if I completely shut down my M1, it will start booting upon any interaction. Opening the lid => starts booting. Pressing any key => starts booting. Clicking the trackpad => starts booting. Which is funny, because the trackpad doesn't physically click anymore, it just reacts to pressure, and only if it's a finger pressing on it (you can't click it with any object), and all that it still working when the computer is "shut down", i.e. you can't click the trackpad with a pen, but you can with your finger and it will turn the MacBook on.

Same issue here. 2020 Intel MBP, and when fully shutdown, pressing any key will turn it on. I would far prefer have a single, explicit power button. They even have one that seems as if it should be the power button (the touch ID sensor/key).

Doesn't Macos also do this? I think it's called "Power Nap" Difference is you can just turn it off... whereas in Windows it seems like it's a complete mess.

I've been using Linux for the last 15 years. Had my fair share of issues with suspend. But at least once a laptop was in a state, it tended to stay there. Whether it would resume was another story :P

Well my MBP 16 and before that my original 13" rMBP both did unscheduled wake ups and ending up super hot when being transported in my backpack. With the MBP 16, it took me a few days to detect the unscheduled wake ups, setup logging to now show private and then debug and fix the issue.

I have had multiple Mac laptops that were burning hot when I pulled them out of my bag. My iPhone also occasionally tries to melt my pocket. These are not issues that Apple is immune to.

I never really experienced this kind of issue until I was given a corporate macbook by my current employer. I suspect this is due to all the "security" software that comes pre-installed by IT. The software is constantly a source of performance related issues, IO seems to be a big one as if it's constantly checking / scanning.

FWIW I had a similar behavior on my (work) MacBook pro for a while. I'd unplug it from my screen for the weekend and find it overheated with a dead battery.

Turns out I kept bumping the Bluetooth mouse which kept waking it up, and it would stay awake for a while, even with the screen closed. Disabling the permission for Bluetooth devices to wake it fixed it, but I had a couple of Mondays where I couldn't do anything for a half hour while the machine charged up enough to boot.

MacOS continues to connect with Wifi even when the lid is closed and it is suppose to be sleeping. Both Windows and MacOS does not honour the contract with the users.

I was chasing this issue with my previous desktop which, at the time, was in my bedroom. I've always preferred sleep/hibernate over shutting it down but when Windows decided it knew better and to constantly wake it from sleep in the middle of the night to do updates, filling my room with light from all the case/fan leds, I was about ready to go Office Space on the thing. What was worse, it wouldn't go back to sleep after the updates were complete.

Even worse, Microsoft made it so very hard to hunt down all the various settings and registry flags to disable that behavior, AND it reverted to those same settings after every major update. I absolutely despised that desktop for a while.

I had the exact same experience. Nothing like being woken up at 2 am because Windows decided now is a good time to update. It's one of the major reasons I decided to switch to desktop Linux permanently.

> Nothing like being woken up at 2 am because Windows decided now is a good time to update.

while i understand the intention behind automatic updates, i feel it's an anti-user design. It is based on the assumption (a bad one) that the user isn't intelligent enough to do the update at a time suitable for them. It assumes that the windows design and dev team knows better. It takes control away from the user.

Rather than forcing automatic updates, it is better to teach the user why updates are important. Education beats subversion.

They tried that. We're all suffering because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches. Of course, now Microsoft has made it even worse by having routinely broken patches since they no longer do proper in-house testing. End result? Damned if you do patch, damned if you don't.

Windows 10 has been a nightmare in terms of patch quality.

> because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches

A large number of users were not patching because they believe they didn't need to, and they weren't educated well enough.

Raising the competency of the users is part of the responsibility.

A large number of users, such as myself, also probably think that Microsoft could fix some of the reasons that make a full reboot necessary so often.

> because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches

No, they were very responsible. They knew the updates are likely going to be UX downgrades, slow the machine down, make it bluescreen more, or possibly even brick it. That was the experience around Vista/7. That's still the experience today, maybe sans the bluescreen.

The cardinal sin of Microsoft and every other company pushing automatic updates is update commingling. Mixing up security patches (which users need and might even want) with generic bug fixes (which users need and like) with feature updates (which users don't need, and rightfully don't like). As long as all of those are mixed, updating is a risky job, and many users will responsibly decide not to do it.

Software companies designed very intrusive update systems that pestered users. Then they made many updates that break software. This created a culture of hostility to updating. This caused some issues.

Then the software companies and developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the best approach was to force updates on the users. Because when people are already upset with your awful updating mechanisms then forcing them to do so is surely going to improve things. And now we have people crippling update functionality as a result.

I don't mind automatic updates, but I at least want to know when they're going to happen. There are two important pieces of information that are apparently impossible to obtain: "if I put my computer to sleep, will it wake up and update?" and "if I leave my computer on for the next <X> hours, will it reboot and update?"

Half of the time I read the comments here I wonder why people even use Windows. Kudos on you, your computer randomly waking you up because you have no control about anything is none of your issues anymore :)

Try disabling Windows update’s ability to wake via GPO.

Having neutered Windows update my PC actually feels like a PC again.

I used a dell inspiron laptop years ago. As its fan became broken, sometimes it could make noise that people can hear from miles away. And yes, it was scarying when Windows 10 auto reboot and updated at 3AM.

My Windows laptop (Lenovo Ideapad S940) ran out of batter while presumably in the sleep mode in my backpack on multiple occasions. It got so ridiculous that now I listen to its fan after closing the laptop lid to make sure it really really in the sleep mode. I even went as far as trying to figure out how to revert back to the old S3 sleep mode instead of the new Windows 10 "connected standby", but it turned out to be quite a task (and I think it broke something else, so I had to revert things back).

I found a solution on Microsoft's website: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s...

It appears you can instruct it to avoid connecting to the internet to do stuff while in standby. I hope this works since my Surface Book has bad standby drain after sitting on my desk for 2-3 days off charge.

The best part is, most of these security changes you do get reset every so often from patches, so it will revert to the "bad" behavior within 6 months.

pretty much all kind of settings reset - even extremely obnoxious ones like - Microsoft weather using Frankenstein degrees instead (Cience).

Ah yes... microsoft implementing user-friendly shell commands:

> powercfg /setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_none F15576E8-98B7-4186-B944-EAFA664402D9 0

> powercfg /setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_none F15576E8-98B7-4186-B944-EAFA664402D9 0

Man, if I have to dig in that deep to get basic functionality, I'd rather just bite the bullet and get a linux machine set up the way I like

I've got a Surface Pro 4. It was great for the first year or so, when I was using it as a tablet on the couch for browsing, reading, and as a digital scratchpad.

I then got an iPad via a ridiculously good deal from Comcast (128 GB 6th generation (which was the latest generation at the time) for $120. The iPad took over most browsing, reading, and scratchpad duties, with the SP4 just getting occasional use when I needed something more general than the iPad.

What I noticed when the SP4 went from daily use to weekly or so is that the battery would always be low when I went to use it. Charge it up fully and shut it down...and a week later it needs charging again.

I believe that is because shut down is really some kind of sleep or hibernate. I've tried disabling all of those, and fast start. I've tried shutting down from the start menu, with and without the modifiers that are supposed to make it really shut down. I've tried command line commands that are supposed to really shut it down. I've tried shutting down from the BIOS.

But no matter what I do it consumes significant power while off. If I leave it on the charger so that it will be ready when I need it, it seems to charge to full, then stop charging until the battery drains a bit, and then repeats that cycles.

The result is after a couple years of sporadic use, the battery was degraded enough that now just using it for light browsing I'm lucky if I get 30 minutes of battery time. So now it is pretty much relegated to only being usable when hooked to external power.

I'm never buying another Surface product. And I'm not buying any Windows laptops or tablets unless there is some reasonable way to definitely turn them all the way off and have them stay that way.

There was a particular Windows Update, after which my Surface Pro started doing this more and more, and it eventually fried the battery to the point of not being able to charge enough to even get the data off. I loved that thing, but I didn't get another Surface.

The lack of respect for users is really shocking lately.

It's "for our security," dontchaknow.

This isn't a "lately" thing. In 2007, a friend of mine postponed his Windows updates often enough that the machine just restarted to install updates _in the middle of the day while he was using it_. This wasn't a glitch either: there was an Update pop-up that just informed him "fuck you I'm restarting in X minutes".

I'm in awe at how much contempt some guy at Microsoft must have for users and their use-cases to conceive of a feature like that. One imagines Microsoft thinks of all of their users as yokels doing nothing more important than playing Solitaire all day.

It solidified in my mind the impression that Windows is not meant to be run on any machine you consider more important than a toy.

I'm in two minds on this. As a user, it does irritate me that I'm forced to put all my work on hold to install updates.

However, as a security professional, I think the general population doesn't understand just how critical it is to stay up to date with software updates. Sometimes we have to force them!

That's the thing: both of those views are compatible with my perspective. Contempt for the user may be in the interest of any given user, just like forcing your kid to eat vegetables instead of ice cream all the time is.

But forcibly shutting down a machine in the middle of the day during active usage is a cardinal sin, just about the most fundamental user-hostile activity I can imagine. Microsoft may be right, and there may be a portion of the general population whose computer usage is 100% pointless nonsense that can be interrupted as easily as you'd interrupt your child's videogame to make him do homework. But I'm not in that group, and I doubt anybody here would consider everything they do on their computer to fall into that bucket.

Computers touch _everything_. I'm not an NSA agent or a hacker on a heist team, and I can think of a dozen (non-work) times in the last month where a shutdown-interruption of the work I was doing would have been a big problem.

Which brings me to my tldr: I'm not suggesting that Windows' decision is a generally bad one. I'm saying that it's a poor fit for anyone who considers their computer to be anything but a useless toy.

No. No, you don't have to "force them."

It's my computer, you see. It's not yours. You're welcome to buy your own, of course. But this one is mine. That's why they call it a "Personal Computer."

The rest of us aren't going to let you turn the Internet into the modern equivalent of a closed IBM shop, at least not without opposition. There's a history here, one you might be too young to have experienced personally. It's been well-documented, though. Steven Levy's Hackers is a great place to start, highly recommended.

Causing fires in travelers' backpacks is not a worthwhile trade-off for security, sorry.

Neither is getting awakened at 4am by plinks from the OS intending to alert you to the installation of updates. If you're going to have so little respect for the user then just install them w/o making any noise.

I feel using Windows for anything other than gaming is just going to give you more headaches than just learning to use a unix based OS. Most applications are available on multiple platforms and alternatives exist for those few applications that are not available.

In my opinion, the only reason why Windows is so prevalent in the "enterprise" world is because Microsoft provides support contracts to make it easier to adopt. Problems with your windows laptop? Send it off to Microsoft or open a business priority ticket to have them work on it for you. No need to hire an internal IT team.

I'm a hobbyist photographer. Not enough energy for the hobby to learn new software, so I'm stuck with Lightroom. And since I didn't want another Mac, I'm on Windows now for my personal laptop.

It's ok. Not as snazzy as MacOS. But security/privacy concerns excluded, feels less headachey than Linux (which I'm also using in parallel, since Slackware 7).

I'm not unfamiliar with Linux and I've been looking into switching recently after a long string of Windows "features" causing problems, but unfortunately gaming isn't the only area Microsoft has an advantage. Linux still doesn't support HDR, for instance. It also has a lot of problems with desktop compositing, because the switch from X to Wayland is at the point where neither of them are good options. That's not even getting into enterprise software compatibility.

For programming, by all means use Linux instead of Windows, it's better. For anything else, it's still not there yet.

Why is anyone interested in HDR? 16M colors should be enough for anyone.

I do have minor issues when scaling my 4K screen to a lower resolution, and starting a fullscreen game, but that’s about it.

I personally hate the color banding you get from things like big drop shadow radiuses in webpages. Look at them from juuust the wrong angle and... war flashbacks to Windows 3.1 in 256 colors.

I'm not sure if newer tech has better viewing angles than my old (but not that old) IPS LCD, but having having greater color depth to represent color fades with finer progression, and having more pixels to spread the fade across (hidpi), does sound like a nice step forward to me.

~"1.07 billion colors" though? Ehhh, I can't deny that does feel like overkill, but I'm honestly not even sure if there's a way to fix the above problem with a smaller colorspace.

> ~"1.07 billion colors" though? Ehhh, I can't deny that does feel like overkill, but I'm honestly not even sure if there's a way to fix the above problem with a smaller colorspace.

Given that we're starting with 24 bits / 16.7 million, we're just up 6 bits more.. or 2 more bits per color... so a purely red gradient would have 4x as many steps.

And we're using some of that space to get "whiter than white" -- so that the brightest white in photos/videos can be brighter than the normal value of white. https://www.lifewire.com/how-apple-devices-show-hdr-brighter...

It's not about the colors so much as the fantastic contrast, it really makes games/videos feel more alive.

I even dropped Windows for gaming.

Almost all Steam games work flawlessly out of the box now thanks to extensive investment in Proton.

That is why the Valve is confident shipping the steam deck with Linux.

Thank you for giving me the courage to go this route. The only reason I'm on Windows at this point is for gaming. Time to give Proton another try. I can't wait for my Steam Deck to arrive next year! =)

Some games will have issues due largely to drivers. But I stopped booting to my win7 partition at least a year and a half ago, and gaming on steam has only gotten better. Just know that games with anti cheat tend to not work. Lucky for me the only multiplayer game I play much of is Overwatch on lutris. And lutris is still supported enough by blizzard that it won’t trigger a ban by itself.

That situation just got a huge update this week: https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-la...

I have just recently done the same thing, Pop OS with Steam, on my gaming PC. It works perfectly so far and I'm so thrilled - CS Go, Planet Coaster, and most recently Gas Station Simulator have been playing great for me. It gives me a lot of hope that the Steam deck is going to be a real game changer.

True but I have to say Microsoft support is pretty awful. Most of the tickets that aren't trivial (and most aren't since we have pretty experienced people) end in endless "give us more logs / try one of the many things we've asked to try before again" loops until we either find the cause ourselves or a workaround.

I know business premium support is a selling point (ironic because it actually costs money on its own) which is good for the CYA of top management. Someone to blame when stuff goes wrong. But it doesn't really solve issues on the floor and Microsoft isn't alone in that.

I mean, I know it's too late to help you, but running "powercfg.exe /lastwake" after a windows computer wakes from standby will tell you exactly what woke it up, if it knows.

I've never had it return with "unknown" once in over a decade, but some people I know have.

if you can find all the things waking the computer, and fix those things, it will never wake without user intervention.

usually, for me, it's been device drivers which have permission to wake the computer from sleep by default, for some stupid reason. removing that permission on those devices has eliminated "hot bag syndrome" for me entirely.

I agree that these steps should not need to be taken. device driver authors are the source of almost all bad crap like this in windows.

I have NEVER in my life ever gotten a useful output from `powercfg.exe /lastwake`. I'm honestly surprised to hear someone mention it as working, I thought it was the sort of thing that was just copypasted on clickfarming tech-help blogs without any sort of verification that it actually works.

In fact I just tried it again on 4 computers and every one of them said "Wake History Count - 0".

note that it won't report reasons the machine was woken from hibernate, since hibernate isn't a sleep state.

also, run the command as an administrator. not just using an account that is an administrator. use an elevated cmd prompt or PowerShell window.

if you're doing all that, idk what's going on.

You can, however, see what devices are capable of waking your machine, and then disable them, by using the commands in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647492

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ No hibernation, yes admin, yes elevated prompt, nada. Disabling devices has never worked for me either, again I'm legitimately surprised that these things have ever worked for anyone since it's never had any effect whenever I've tried it.

check the tasks in Task Scheduler, too. those can also wake a PC from sleep.

I wish that were true! I'd love to know how to do that one too since back in Windows 7 Foobar2k was able to wake my PC from sleep and play my music as an alarm, and this functionality has not worked for me since then.

For a device to be able to wake a Windows system, it has to be allowed both in the BIOS and also in Windows's device manager (In the "power management" tab on a device, the checkbox on "Allow this device to wake the computer" has to be set/unset). It is available only on certain classes of devices.

Also what you are referring to as an application's capability (Foobar...) to wake a computer (from sleep or hibernation only) it most probably has to do with setting an RTC (real-time clock) alarm and the computer being allowed to resume from such an event. Again this is also a setting which can be disabled in most BIOS configurations and yours probably is. By the way, Windows' task scheduler exposes this option to everyone so you can set your computer to wake up and run some script and then sleep again (I used to do this all the time ages ago for night downloads, etc.)

So, there are a series of switches (in BIOS and in windows device manager) that all have to be set/unset, for a computer to resume from some event;

It only works for the most basic mouse/keyboard scenarios in my experience

>>I mean, I know it's too late to help you, but running "powercfg.exe /lastwake" after a windows computer wakes from standby will tell you exactly what woke it up, if it knows.

I'm one of those people - my computer kept waking up in the middle of the night and that command would always just return "wake source: unknown" for me.

are there devices which are allowed to wake your computer?

    powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

if anything shows up, disable those devices with this command:

    powercfg -devicedisablewake "Device Name"

I quickly googled this but I don't expect a lot of people to know what to search for, so if you've already found this and tried it, then I really am out of ideas this time.

if you haven't tried this, try it, and I really hope it helps.

I got rid of that PC a year ago :P But trust me, I tried literally every trick in the book, including the one above. No devices had the capability to wake up the PC(yes, including the mouse and the keyboard), disabled all wake timers, disabled all networking(in fact unplugged the ethernet cable).....it would still wake up in the middle of the night. It was the most confusing thing I ever dealt with in computers.

yeah, software can wake the PC too. alarms and the like will wake a sleeping PC.

in your case I would scrutinize the task scheduler for tasks that are allowed to wake the PC.

Was this exactly at midnight, as in 12:00?

It's possible auto wakeup was enabled in the BIOS, with the wake time set to the default of 00:00.

Alternatively, if it was a different time, perhaps *that* was the default, or maybe the value accidentally got changed.

Alternatively-alternatively, maybe the BIOS had a bug in it that somehow enabled auto wake without presenting an option. To tackle this, I would've reset the BIOS settings. (I once had an ADSL2+ modem that randomly started flaking out and not connecting correctly. Changed every accessible setting I could, no dice. Factory reset = instantly back to normal.)

I wish I had known about this.

That said, the tablet felt so infuriating to me that I was honestly happy when it was gone again, despite the financial loss.

> I know it's too late to help you

But it's not too late to help others! Thank you for showing us how insane this is.

What's insane here? Waking the machine up is a legitimate use case, and it's easily traceable and configurable.

A machine doing something I didn't tell it to is insane.

I am the user. I use the machine, not the other way around.

The hardware and software making the decision to wake the device isn't necessarily privy to concepts like "user" or "intent"; At that layer, it's all just signals. Someone has to design the system to interpret what those signals/events are supposed to lead to (e.g. should connecting a cable to a closed laptop wake it up? What if the thing on the other end of that cable is a mouse, or a storage device, or a charger, or a docking station? What if I jiggle my Bluetooth mouse, causing it to re-establish its connection to the laptop's Bluetooth radio? Should other state be considered before making a decision?).

The fact that such a subsystem exists isn't an indication of malice or a subversion of your will. There will be bugs in such a system, but the system still needs to be there.

That is called ‘poor quality system design’ - it isn’t a feature.

But all of those cases should be governed by a very simple overarching rule: If the laptop lid is closed, assume that it is in a closed bag with no cooling available to it.

Because that is the usecase that hibernate is for. It makes laptops convenient by allowing you to just close the lid, put it in a bag, go somewhere, take it out of the bag, and then open it and continue working. If you need to tell people that they need to shut down their computers properly before putting them into bags, you have just produced a vastly inferior product.

This is an area where Microsoft desperately needs a Chief-making-it-not-suck-Officer. Someone who can just take that surface laptop, notice that some idiot actually wrote that you are supposed to shut it down instead of hibernating to put it in a bag, and yell at people until the product is fixed. Because right now it's broken.

Except your rule isn't a rule at all, it's just you assuming everyone else has the same usage pattern as you (they don't).

Pre-covid I had many co-workers who would sit down, plug their laptop into the dock, and work the whole day without ever opening the lid.

I've also spent 15+ years with a laptop connected to my TV that never has the lid open, and I definitely expect it to wake up when I sit on the couch and wiggle the Bluetooth mouse.

That's because the parent comment's rule was incomplete. The correct rule would be: lid closed, with no external displays or external power connected.

If you insisted on telling the machine to do everything it does, you'd get nothing done. I suppose you could use an abacus.

Expecting a computer to not do random insane unexpected shit is too much to ask for I guess?

That depends entirely on what you consider insane. MacOS for example does so many things that I consider utterly batshit insane, but here we are. Lots of people love it. It's a given that a consumer operating system will do many, many things without direct user input.

There are all sorts of things a machine does without user input. It is simply not possible to have a user OK each and every design decision for a machine.

And running a configuration command is in fact you telling it what to do.

So the actual issue is open-systems vs walled-gardens in system design and how it surfaces in consumer products. The only thing Windows can do is force you to review each and every device driver on install for e.g. can wake machine. A non-starter for a consumer OS.

Waking the machine is a use case but having things unexpectedly wake the machine is a failure of that use case.

And easily configurable is subjective. Sure most readers here can work through it but requiring use of the CLI is not "easy" for most people. Not to mention the discoverability of that feature in the first place.

waking the machine when the lid is closed and the thing is stuffed in a bag or a backpack is many things, but legitimate use case isn't one of them.

I had this problem for months with my computer booting randomly some nights, waking me because of its loud fans. Turns out it was our dog pushing my desk chair so that the armrest bumped some key on the keyboard.

Haha I should have mentioned that one as a repeat offender. After the Surface wakes up, reboots, makes noise, gets hot, and drains 20% of its battery, if I then run "powercfg.exe /lastwake" it'll pretend that it did not wake up X_X

And in my case, there wasn't any non-Microsoft drivers on the system. The issue appears to be that they do magical stuff when they spot a WiFi connection, or when my WiFi router does its daily reboot.

Are you sure it went to sleep? I’ve had prior issues on a Surface and a 9310 where it appeared to sleep but didn’t. I found that out through Event Viewer.

Offtopic:

> or when my WiFi router does its daily reboot.

Damn, I think that might fix 99% of the issues I have with my WiFi router.

Yeah it helps. I recommend it as well, I have it scheduled to reboot at 5:15 AM every day.

I have a $300 Ubiquiti Dream Machine and that thing CANT be scheduled to reboot. doesn't matter because Ethernet dies twice a day, and I need to use my phone to get to the admin page to restart the thing. most annoying and expensive router I've ever owned.

I DO NOT understand how all routers I have ever owned are total garbage, but they all have been.

(Computer that's always on + $2 Wi-Fi dongle (or a slightly more expensive one with an actual antenna, if required) + network namespace-specific alternate route = scriptable scheduled reboot.

Hm, or you could just use a Raspberry Pi.

i use a mechanical clocked power outlet that cuts power once a day to the router

I've an external Webcam on wifi that occasionally loses its connection. I also have some basic home automation for lighting and a weather station, based on a Raspberry Pi running Node-RED.

The cam is pinged every 5 mins and if it doesn't respond, Node-RED power cycles a mains switch connected to it - and sends me an email! If the camera doesn't come back, the power is cycled up to a total of 5 times before I get a final email that says I need to take a look.

Weird, my udm pro goes months with no issues.. current uptime of most UniFi devices on my network is over 70 days right now. I’d say contact support because it shouldn’t so that, but their support isn’t great

Same here - My UDM Pro is over 90 days uptime, and that last reboot was only because I did an upgrade. I have heard of some people having problems, but mine has been flawless so far.

I've ordered a UPS and I guess I'll see if that's the issue.

I use a lot of fans in my house to circulate air, and when someone uses the microwave, half of the fans slow down, and half speed up significantly. no idea how half could speed up, but they do. so, something is up with something, somewhere.

I expect this UPS to beep a lot.

oh that could easily do it! anytime there are weird issues with computers and no obvious cause power and/or RAM are the likely culprits.

good luck! hope it works, UDM pro isn't without its issues, but it's pretty dang good for what it does!

Some routers (and other electronics) are very sensitive to short spikes or drips in mains power. Having some heavy duty stuff such as heating cables or water heater or tumble dryer on the same circuit is enough. Get equipment to monitor it.

I got a small UPS and it seems to be doing the trick. thank you!

I was wrong. different problems now, not the "it just works" result I was hoping for.

Put it behind a UPS and buy one of their smart plugs. It'll detect internet outages and reset the connected device automatically.

Also, I buy and deploy a lot of Unifi/ER equipment and that doesn't happen. I think you've noticed there's a common factor in your final statement, though.

it is a bit messed up that you think it's me. I change configs on these things only enough to get them to function, and then I leave them alone.

and what exactly could I be doing to cause random DNS failures, or to cause DHCP to fail only on Ethernet ports? these things can't be configured to do that. they're consumer-grade routers and consumer-grade routers are garbage. all of them.

every enterprise router or access point I administer at work functions just fine for years at a time.

I know it's just an anecdote, but I've always had issues buying(very expensive) home routers from netgear or Linksys, super unreliable devices no matter the price - finally gave up and just started using my ISP provided router(BT whatever hub, latest one) - zero issues. Rock solid WiFi and ethernet. I can see the uptime on it right now is over 100 days and I have no reason to restart it. Yes it's not quite as configurable as some of the other routers I've had but at least it just works.

I'm glad you're pleased, although I know that's also a relative experience. I recently helped a colleague using Free[1] in France and was blown away by... pretty much all of it.

He was paying €15/mo for 4K television plus 1/0.6Gbit fiber internet on custom hardware they'd provided. I can't help but feel something went terribly wrong in the US for us to be happy with our $80/mo cable options and dated, generic hardware.

[1] https://www.free.fr/freebox/

It just works when it works.

Static devices (as opposed to DHCP reservations) will just (seemingly) randomly stop working with port forwarding, as the router just forgets the device. You can shake it out of that by pinging the device from the router's diag tools, or power cycling the router resolves the issue. Not great for CCTV DVRs/NVRs.

"Smart setup" sometimes breaks stuff, especially IoT stuff.

Your device may or may not just randomly factory reset itself. (I've had one do it twice in three years, to the point where I now save the config.)

It may or may not completely ruin your Sky Q system's reliability if you have more than one box (although I generally advocate wiring them in completely and disabling all wireless functionality anyway).

The automatic channel setting for the WiFi channels is a total dice roll.

The DNS interception rubbish breaks stuff. Most recent example was I was having infuriating issues with Ubiquiti's AP guest portal... Until I switched the BT Business Hub into a dumb modem and put a cheap ER-x in front. Rock solid since.

The only router I've had not give me any gruff is the Mikrotik stuff, hot damn is it hard to configure as its very advanced at times, but once its configured. it /never/ goes down

I got a MikroTik router just a few months ago and it does run great, has anything you could want under the sun, and it was even cheap! But like you said, it is very advanced, and as a network noob I probably spent 12 hours configuring it to do everything I wanted despite considering myself pretty tech savy, and don't even know exactly what I did to make it work as I wanted. Although if it is just a single router typical home setup most people could just use a default setup and make it work.

The community also seemed pretty elitist, I went through many forum posts about people with similar setup questions and/or problems as myself and fairly often they got simply berated when they didn't understand what a certain setting actually did or didn't understand exactly what people were having them input through a 30 item terminal command. The wiki has an example of just about everything once but even that was far from comprehensive when there are 20+ different options and you don't know what they mean and the example on the wiki picks just one of them and doesn't explain why they chose that one.

I don't regret the purchase at all, however I don't think I could feel safe in randomly recommending it to anybody except the most tech savy of my tech savy friends.

Teltonika seem to make the least garbage routers I have tried. Lots of options to failover, reboot if pings fail etc too

I have a Nokia GPON Home Gateway+Wifi Router given by my Fiber ISP. And it is on UPS and its been running for weeks without reboot just fine.

A child comment stating its sensitivity to power dips may be the cause here. I don't have a UDM, but I do have a lot of Unifi equipment and the only issues I've ever had are an AP dropping clients and refusing to pick new ones up, and a switch latching onto a bad local route and refusing to let it go. Rebooting the devices fixed it in both cases.

By far, internet connectivity has never been better at my house. I've had various Netgear, D-Link, and Linksys devices. Unifi beats everything hands-down.

I think you were right. after reading your comment, and the other you mentioned, I ordered a small UPS that will shield my modem and router from transient power problems, and while it hasn't been a full day, yet, I haven't had to reboot anything since I installed that guy.

so far I am quite glad that I mentioned my problem here.

Why is that necessary?

My router reboots only when the electricity is cut. So many weeks or even months between each reboot.

Wi-Fi works, Ethernet works even better, and I have some Automobilista (videogame) servers open to the world.

It is a big issue if my IP changes, so I am very aware of all these things.

Still, no reboots needed.

I scheduled my WiFi router to reboot once a week. Ever since then I have to think about it about as often as I do my microwave.

>The issue appears to be that they do magical stuff when they spot a WiFi connection, or when my WiFi router does its daily reboot.

I think that might've been my issue that kept waking up my desktop. I tried disabling everything I could to stop wake ups - to make it only wake up on pressing the power button, but I never got it to work properly. The desktop would just seemingly randomly decide that it wants to wake up again. I eventually stopped trying to put computers to sleep - it's either shut down or it just stays running.

Sometimes I turn off my laptop's wifi before putting it to sleep, and it makes a big difference in battery life.

Power & Sleep settings > Additional power settings > Change plan settings > Change advanced power settings > Sleep > Allow wake timers > Disable

This "Allow Wake Timers" option does not exist in this location on my PC.

A new wake-up reason might get installed in the future. Instead I found some powershell code ages ago, created a `nap` function in my $profile, and set the option to not allow waking it from sleep:

    # load assembly System.Windows.Forms which will be used
    Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms
    
    # set powerstate to suspend (sleep mode)
    $PowerState = [System.Windows.Forms.PowerState]::Suspend;
    
    # do not force putting Windows to sleep
    $Force = $false;
    
    # don't allow the computer to be woken by devices or tasks (e.g. windows updates)
    $DisableWake = $true;
    
    # do it! Set computer to sleep
    [System.Windows.Forms.Application]::SetSuspendState($PowerState, $Force, $DisableWake) | Out-Null;

Windows update is one of the things that don't show up with powercfg, as far as I can recall.

My desktop used to wake itself up all the time to update and in addition to hunting down all the devices, there was a scheduled task for Office updates that I had to disable. It would wake the computer up and then Windows updates would install because the computer was awake at the scheduled time, giving me the false impression that Windows update was causing the wake.

In 8-9 years of using Surface Pros, on the other hand, I have never had one that woke from sleep to install updates or cooked itself in a bag. They have been trouble-free for me and my favorite travel computer.

Really need to look into a BSD with Windows VM for my next desktop though.

> Really need to look into a BSD with Windows VM for my next desktop though.

You can get all the BSD’s you want on Windows!

yeah, Windows Update is a scheduled task, so look in there to see if it is allowed to wake the PC from sleep.

And people say Linux is the difficult OS.

This stuff previously worked correctly on windows 7, I guess they saw things like spotty headphone jack detection, 100% CPU fan blasting while lid closed, etc. and thought it was a good idea to copy it.

I've always had success with hibernate. Does this stuff bypass hibernate now too?

Yes I had a Surface Pro 3 with Linux on it and it still woke up in my bag sometimes. I'd take it out and it'd be running, boiling hot and battery almost depleted.

I never figured out what caused it, maybe it was something in the firmware. Or something bumping the power button? However it was in a padded laptop compartment on its own.This was actually from full-off. Not even standby.

What didn't help was that I used LUKS full disk encryption so it would be sitting there waiting for a password and there was no sleep timeout.

In the end I found the SP3 was just not great for Linux, I had so many hardware issues. Sometimes I'd detach the keyboard and reattach, and it'd just not work. Or the pen would stop working or the rotation etc. Mind you this is around the time it came out. So a good while ago.

I really like the form factor, but my Surface Pro 7 has really let me down lately. It’s about a year old now and fully patched, but the battery barely lasts 4 hours, camera is buggy (Windows Hello stops working), and randomly shuts down.

What's super annoying is that Dell does not provide a BIOS option to switch between connected standby and S3. It's likely a cost saving decision because S3 is more complex to implement and having both options even more so. There are also some rumors that Dell may be under contractual agreement with MS to only support connected standby.

Psst. On certain motherboards Dell just removed the option from the UI but the implementation is still there. They also oh so helpfully store their config in EFI variables so... If you're lucky you can just flip the right bit and enable S3 sleep again. For example the G5 5505 has it in D01SetupConfig and you just need to find the right offset that corresponds to it. https://www.reddit.com/r/DellG5SE/comments/kpg3ez/how_to_dis...

Far be it for me to defend Microsoft here, but I feel like if you leave unsaved documents open overnight, you are asking for trouble. Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me.

This whole post is actually pretty confusing to me. I don't use Windows that frequently myself, but my work laptop, my wife's laptop, my child's laptop, and my Surface Pro 1 all have Windows 10 on them, and this sort of thing has never happened to me. But I do my updates in a timely manner, shut down my PCs regularly, and only use sleep for temporary moments when I'm away from my PC.

I just feel like a lot of the problems people have with Windows 10 aren't really in the software, but are between the keyboard and chair.

> Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me.

Because on other computers it just works. And if the computer stops it will re-open your unsaved documents.

But I don’t think it’s an unrealistic expectation. A Linux server might have uptime measured in years, and the same thing is possible for a desktop (maybe you use your desktop as a home server, too)

> Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me.

In my case, it was mostly executables that I'm in the process of debugging and stepping through. I'm not aware of any debugger which can save and restore open file handles.

> I just feel like a lot of the problems people have with Windows 10 aren't really in the software, but are between the keyboard and chair.

I would have argued just like you before I encountered the cursed tablet. That thing had an integrated battery, so no matter what you tried, it could still turn on by itself if it wanted to. The only reliable way to make it stop making noises in the middle of the night was to thoroughly drain its battery.

That said, the Dell XPS support post that I commented on is by itself pretty detailed about all the issues that Dell machines are having with Windows 10. I think you'll believe me that Dell wouldn't publicly post that unless they had a lot of support requests related to it. So it's apparently a widespread issue.

> executables that I'm in the process of debugging

In my case, virtual-machines. When Windows 10 decided it had to reboot, it would kill them dead. You can't quicksave those, and even if you did they have a higher-than-normal chance of not coming back up cleanly.

That's interesting, I usually treat the ability of easily snapshotting and restoring virtual machines as one of the main reasons for doing things inside a VM.

I believe some of the Ubuntu ones would occasionally just not recover correctly, some kind of video-card issue most likely.

In any case, Win10 did not signal VirtualBox to save state -- or else didn't give it enough time -- so I would occasionally come back to my office to find everything I was working on gone due to some mystery-reboot that I didn't recall scheduling.

> Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me.

Because it's extremely convenient and I don't remember ever losing anything on my Mac. I close the lid in the evening, open it the next morning and everything is there exactly like I left it. MariaDB is still running, my IDE is still running, and I can jump right in. Day after day after day, my uptime is usually the number of days since the last macOS update.

The longest I’ve had my work laptop up is around 40 days. Usually shorter, as it slowly corrupts itself until it BSODed with memory management or page fault.

Close my Mac, take it somewhere, open it up - there everything is.

Close my work laptop, take it to the office, open it up - it's hot to the touch, stuck on the Dell high temperature warning screen, and needs to cool down and reboot.

Of course it would be crazy for me to keep repeating this scenario (I tried changing the hibernation settings, and now just shut it down) - but we can wish for it to be better, especially since it's obviously possible.

A key part is not only about saving particular documents but about keeping the whole state of all apps as-is, which is not compatible with "shut down my PCs regularly".

My workflow involves closing up the laptop, carrying it elsewhere (while it sleeps - it has to survive being in a bag so not heating up), reopening with all the exact state it had, potentially many times each day. Then at the end of computer-day closing it (to sleep mode), and starting the next morning exactly where I left off - not from a clean after-shutdown state. Even for an unavoidable reboot (e.g. install of OS version update) I'd expect most of that state to be restored e.g. OS X and compatible apps restoring most the open apps and documents as they were - sadly it doesn't work as well as it should, so sleep is strongly preferable to anything involving a reboot.

A full shutdown is an extraordinary event that's done when placing an unused system in long-term storage or when giving it to someone else, because all other daily usage (and short breaks e.g. weekends, not just "temporary moments when I'm away from my PC.") is better suited by a sleep/hibernate mode, at least if that works properly.

TL;DR - a need to shutdown regularly is a fundamental design flaw, not a problem between keyboard and chair.

I actually had windows go so far as to start a laptop inside a tightly packed backpack around 3am for updates or whatever and restart chrome and start blasting YouTube advertising full volume when I needed to be up early the next morning. Disrupted sleep or potential house fire...Microsoft is beyond shameless and have been brazenly so for at least 20 some years now.

I doubt it intentionally started playing a YouTube video, so I don’t see how this is a shameless act. Most likely it just launched whatever you had open after it restarted or something. I seriously doubt Microsoft is making profit off of YouTube ads in Chrome.

I'd imagine shameless refers to Microsoft's lack of consideration when it comes to the second order effects of decisions like these.

I've owned both a Microsoft Surface laptop and currently own an XPS 15. Both of them I have had the same thing happen where they are in "sleep" mode and have woken up. I'll have them in a bag and open them up and it's really cooking inside the laptop sleeve and the laptop and bag are quite warm. Honestly the amount of heat there I wouldn't be surprised if there have been fires from this kind of stuff.

Basically if I know I won't be using my laptop for a bit and am putting it in a bag I always make sure to turn it off now.

I was given a Latitude 5300 2-in-1 running Windows 10 by a client for a short term project last year, there were multiple `big bro` installed on it so I didn't bother to tinker it much other than requesting local admin access so as to install WSL2 and Ubuntu in order to build a productive environment to get things done (implement a flavour of K8s distribution in fully air-gapped environment). BIOS is password protected so I can't even run USB Live Linux distros (to test performance of the hardware or play around).

Some interesting observations:

  1. fan spins crazily for no reason randomly, and the laptop seemed to be always heated (in comparison with MBP and other laptops running Linux).

  2. it can become overly hot and fan can spin even if it was in sleep! This was scary so after seeing it once I tend to power if off whenever finishing using it. Some times it didn't wake up, giving a QR code (BSOD...)

  3. the not-too-bad specs failed to pump out expected performance (so sluggish), in comparison with similar hardware running Linux x86_64 or macOS (not surprised)

NOTE: Feeling lucky that my kids school allows BYOD, simply picked M1 MBA for both to avoid the Windows debt (in most cases hardware is not to blame, I've used many Dell Latitude models with positive impression).

This is why I don’t use windows right here.

I’d recommend just using a long term service channel version of Windows. It’s designed for embedded systems like MRIs so I doesn’t do any of the auto install and restart crap. Also doesn’t have the telemetry or most any other bloat ware Windows usually comes with.

> doesn’t do any of the auto install and restart crap

That's misleading.

LTSC version does everything regular versions do exactl wrt automatic updates and wakeups.

Only difference is you can disable these with group policy in enterprise versions (which ltsc is)

You can absolutely disable them in the Pro and Home editions.

Updates are mandatory in Home edition. Sure you can brute-force your way around it but that hardly counts as disabling it.

This really sounds like a hardware issue. I have had a Lenovo Carbon X1 for 3.5 years and have never had this issue with it.

You can disable some of this by disabling the wake timers setting in your bios/UEFI menu.

I personally turned them on intentionally, as I mostly use my PC as a music/fine server these days; I configured most of my applications (bubbleupnp, nginx, airsonic, everything, etc) to start up either as system services on boot; the rest (WSL, fb2k, calibre) start up on login via schtasks, so if my they aren't working remotely I can just login via TeamViewer to log into my profile. Without this setup, my computer would _never_ get updates, as I don't sit down at it much anymore.

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.

I also have a 9500. I'm considering selling it, the hardware is just so buggy.

If I do I'll probably buy a framework laptop.

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.

I just can't understand how people put up with not being able to control what they primary machines are doing.

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.

> 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.

I have a T440 which runs quite hot, where did you look for sources of power usage (beyond powertop) ?

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.

My T440 does not have a discrete GPU.

It's basically a T440s without the touchpad. But it's got an i7, of that matters.

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.

Nah, just a dual-core i7 @ 2.1 GHz. I got that laptop 2nd hand, so that was it.

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!

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.

neigh: what horsies say

nigh: near, nearly

nay: unless, of course, the force of course is the famous grandparent

2c: Had an XPS15 die the other day, won't buy another. Also sworn off Apple hardware. Using Lenovo laptop. All good.

Thanks. I wasn't aware. English isn't my native language.

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.

Unfortunately these issues exist in Linux as well. There's no S3 in the bios.

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.

Have you tried setting mem_sleep to deep? This helped on my Thinkpad until I got a new enough kernel that allowed the system to fully enter C10 state.

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 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.

On the latest XPS that's not even an option: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/Ubuntu-deep-sleep-missing...

(I've just seen the last posts on that thread and will give it a try)

Did you try installing the Dell apt repository and drivers plus tlp?

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.

Only reason I upgraded was to get 32GB of RAM. So far, it's underwhelming...

I did the same, but I actually utilize this much RAM regularly.

Switch to AHCI fixed C10 sleep for me in Linux,

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.

Yep, the XPS 9500 and 9700 series with a discrete GPU cannot to s3 sleep.

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.

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.

You need Pro for that, no group policy editor in Home.

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.

[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/how-to...

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.

This is a life-threating design. A high-end "gamer" laptop in a bag powering up unexpectedly could easily catch fire and kill someone.

These shenanigans will keep going on until someone dies and a manager or two at Microsoft is sent to jail for criminal negligence.

> These shenanigans will keep going on until someone dies

This will happen.

> and a manager or two at Microsoft is sent to jail for criminal negligence.

This will never happen.

Now imagine this happening in the overhead bin of a plane.

Or in the cargo hold.

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...

What happened to overheating protection (and then hard shutdown from the BIOS)

How can laptop catch fire? CPU throttles itself at 100 C and shuts down shortly thereafter. 100C is not enough to make a fire.

CPUs don't burn, but lithium ion cells don't like being at 100C.

> 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.

Before you put it sleep activate Airplane mode. Hopefully it will disable wake ups.

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".

> Windows keeps waking up for random things

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.

powercfg /lastwake will tell you why the machine woke up.

Honestly I'm not sure where else you can find that information.

Generally it doesn't actually tell you why.

lastwake will be blank and the power report will just tell you it changed state but give no reason.

I found the same thing when I was trying to figure out why an Intel NUC7i5 keeps waking up for 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.

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".

"unknown source", probably bill gates trolling you /s

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.

Modem cycling DHCP IP ?

Mine used to do it at midnight and wake up my desktop till I gave it a static address

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.

I haven't used Windows on a laptop since 2014, and I'm... feeling validated about that decision right now

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.

You're right, checked my notes and it loses 8% on average over 8 hours.

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"!!

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.

Perhaps one root cause is that popular reviewers dig into battery life while the laptop is being used, but not when it's sleeping and/or powered down.

So manufacturers just neglect this side of things, or cut corners to save money.

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.

My lenovo laptop has an option to force S3 standby in the bios, you just choose "Linux" instead of the default "Windows 10" sleep mode.

Ironically, the reason S3 is not available is because of Microsoft.

>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.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/h0r56s/getting_back_s...

> 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.

> started turning on just because the lid was open.

Fridges have this problem too, but if you’re taking one of them on a plane it’s your own fault.

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.

I have literally never had macOS' restore session feature work correctly. It's so bad that I just decline it.

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.

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 ;-)

Hibernate is the best option by far but they seem to want to push away from it.

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).

I did this with my year 2000 Windows laptop ... just shows Apple is 20 years behind on modern technology.

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.

See if cat /sys/power/mem_sleep returns [s2idle] deep

You want it to return [deep] s2idle

Adding something like, /etc/sysfs.d/set-sleep-to-s2ram.conf:

    power/mem_sleep=deep

(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:

    options i915 enable_guc_loading=1 enable_guc_submission=1

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.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/146593-enable-disable-ne...

> All newer Dell laptops now use the Microsoft Modern Standby.

So let me guess: "modern" here is indicates a shitty new thing that doesn't work as well as the old thing.

...after further reading, yep:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...

> On occasion, the system stays in the active mode (with the screen off) for a longer interval of time. These longer active intervals occur for a variety of reasons, for example, processing incoming email or downloading critical Windows updates. Windows components that are allowed to leave the SoC in the active power state are called activators because they are registered with the power manager as capable of blocking the transition back to the idle power mode. The durations of these activities vary widely but are controlled to extend battery life. The durations of the activities can be viewed with the built-in SleepStudy software tool or through Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)-based instrumentation.

This truly an antifeature.

Similar to PowerNap from Apple

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-power-nap-m...

Although I don't think Apple recommends not keeping your laptop in a bag.

> Similar to PowerNap from Apple

That seems pretty easy to turn off. I just checked my Mac and it's disabled, and the description around the setting was clear enough for me to know I didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole.

There's the key. Windows wouldn't be so terrible if you could turn things off. As it stands, I just feel a lot more comfortable using apple or linux or any unix based system basically.

FWIW:

1) Looking at System Preferences right now, the setting for Power Nap reads as follows:

> [x] Enable Power Nap while plugged into a power adapter

> While sleeping, your Mac can back up using Time Machine and periodically check fro new email, calendar, and other iCloud updates

This indicates that it should not have any affect on a sleeping MacBook in a bag (presumably disconnected from power).

2) That said, I have on rare occasions found a former work-issued MacBook Pro to be hot to the touch when removed from my bag after a commute. I assumed this was some bug (not a feature), and I can neither rule out nor implicate the involvement of the nanny software installed by IT.

If you switch to the Battery tab in Energy/Battery preferences, it's there:

"Enable Power Nap while on battery power"

It is separate and definitely not the default

I had these too, even though I have power nap disabled. But given how horrendously buggy the whole power cycle thing in Macs is I am not surprised. I've seen it after coming from sleep completely forget all display configs, freeze cold, switch displays, refuse to connect bluetooth devices until I remove and re-register them, and so much other fun stuff. So just waking up and wasting a ton of battery is par for the course. The whole sleep thing is deeply broken there, and since there's no transparency there's no way to see even if it's "sleeping" or just staying up and heating itself up.

It's not just Microsoft's fault.

Intel have completely removed S3 sleep from the latest Tigerlake chips so even if you run Linux you end up with the same problem.

Lenovo is able to add it back as an option in the BIOS. This is the case for P14s Gen 2 and X1 Carbon Gen 9.

S3 is an ACPI concept, not a hardware one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/k7xrtz/comment/ge...

This sounds like they aren't working on their own ACPI implementation, and are at the mercy of whoever is providing it (motherboard or bios vendor? intel?). Hence conflating hw and firmware and not using precise terminology. Elsewhere in comments here it's claimed that eg Lenovo implemented S3 on these CPUs.

Sounds like government needs to step in if its a safety hazard

So let me guess: "modern" here is indicates a shitty new thing that doesn't work as well as the old thing.

Funny how the software industry has managed to turn the connotation of "modern" for me from "neutral/slightly positive" to "definite negative" in around a decade.

Same here. Hey, one positive: It shows that, greybeard as I am, I'm still able to adapt to changing circumstances. (Well, at least circumstances changing over the course of a decade or so; no guarantee for anything faster than that.)

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.

Oh wow. i did NOT know that. Even worse...

>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?

Spoiler: I have an XPS 9500 under Linux, which sleeps fine under S3 but then it never wakes up. So the problem isn't with Windows.

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 ...

I’ve had a problem like this with my XPS and I was able to solve it by holding the power button for 25-40 seconds to reset something:

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000125880/how-to-re...

A comment above mentions manufacturers removing S3 support from their bios with the exact symptoms you mentioned

So you’re actually "putting it to sleep", when you put it to sleep.

I have an XPS 9500 and it sleeps+wakes, as expected, with S3.

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.

Seems to be mostly a Dell/Microsoft problem, haven't heard of other vendors removing S3 functionality (yet, anyway).

ASUS UM325

Weird, I got a newer Asus (Flow X13) and it does S3 just fine.

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.

hi i have the Yoga Slim 7 too (the white carbon fiber one). How do you enable this ?

The DSDT mod at https://github.com/jrandiny/yoga-slim7-ubuntu worked for me to stop it resetting, but only on the 5.14 kernel. YMMV.

> Switching the power model is not supported in Windows without a complete OS re-install

That's absolutely insane.

Intel just removed S3 sleep completely from the latest Tigerlake chips.

I don't think it's the OEMs / manufacturers, it's Intel.

In case anyone is curious I wrote up how I use suspend (amongst other things) with my XPS 13 running Debian: http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/how-i-use-debian-dell-xps-13...

Nice write-up, but I think the point is on the newer XPS' the S3 option is completely gone.

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.

> "some reason that I don't agree with[0]"

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!

On the other hand ssh sessions staying opened are nice. I agree it doesn't outweigh the mess it created though

> On the other hand ssh sessions staying opened are nice.

Probably a convenience feature for the NSA folks logged in trough the Intel ME.

The very latest (9310) XPS 13 doesn't have S3 at all, though, from what I'm gathering. So even on Linux, it won't sleep well.

Changing the disk to AHCI in BIOS allows my 9310 to reach C10, fixing the sleeping heater issue.

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.

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.

Just wait. The newer laptops don't have S3 in the bios at all.

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.

I own XPS 13 9380 with Windows 10. Same mess with the sleep. I have to carry the laptop in the bag when commuting. You never know what it is doing when lid is closed. There is no lights on the laptop to indicate its state so I just usually put it to my ear and listen until the fan goes off after closing the lid. Then it is semi safe to put it into the bag. Feels like stone age.

Things are just getting worse with Windows and those standard PCs. I never understood why they moved to that S1 idle when S3 was fulfilling basic needs. This family Intel+Windows starts to irritate me. I am seriously considering either fully moving to Linux or to Apple Silicon and Mac OS.

FYI, these computers may lack proper firmware support to deep sleep on Linux as well, and will use s2idle sleep.

I believe ARM Macs use the same type of sleep, only with more polished firmware and better vertical integration with the OS.

Can confirm, 9310 (Late 2020, non-2-in-1), only has s2idle. Still "Ubuntu Certified" which, after this laptop, I've learn doesn't mean much.

I absolutely agree that microsoft could and should make this work better. But the pragmatic workaround is the setting to force hibernation when you close the lid. You can resume from SSD in 10 seconds. No middle of the night wakeups. Much improved battery life.

TFA says that hibernation is problematic for putting your computer into your bag. I understand what you mean by hibernation, and while it should not cause a problem... that's what the link says

When windows is hibernated, if a scheduled task is set for a specific time, it will use the hardware wake-up feature to turn on the machine and run the scheduled task.

Windows has a lot of 3am scheduled tasks for all kinds of random stuff (disk defrag, various update checks, etc). Any of those can cause the system to reawaken.

My dell xps hibernation doesn't work.

20% of the time it works.

40% of the time it won't wake and I have to kill it (screen stays dark even though keyboard indicates it is awake)

30% of the time it just immediately wakes

10% of the time it wakes at like 2am and power cycles my monitor every 30 seconds waking me up

In my case it also messes with many internal devices like webcam, USB etc.

Half the time i have to reboot to make those work again.

I'll back you up on this. I tried the trick to switch to hibernate, but it actually got worse for me than my problems with sleep.

>> 10% of the time it wakes at like 2am and power cycles my monitor every 30 seconds waking me up

My thinkpad does the same. Wtf is up with that?

My Mac did that too but I tracked it to Wake on LAN, some random probes from other equipment were walking it up sometimes.

What kind of evil IoT crapware is sending WoL packets to random devices on the network?

It wasn't actual WoL. It was broadcasts. For some reason it woke the Mac up when WoL was switched on. We're taking 2015 or so so I don't have the packet logs anymore but I was able to replicate it by resending them.

So the fault is really the Mac's. It should only accept real well formed WoL packets with its own Mac address.

OK, from the comments I read so far I realize that I may have been lucky with an older laptop. And I did not mention that I also turned off wake timers, realized that now. If this does not work on modern hardware that’s a real bummer.

I had to do this with my ASUS Zephyrus G14 because it's an AMD-based machine and doesn't support a true Standby mode anyway. It's not the greatest coming from the Mac ecosystem where Sleep basically just works (well, most of the time, High Sierra screwed up a lot of things around that).

To my knowledge, it hasn't woken up without my input and Hibernate doesn't eat the battery alive while it's asleep.

The funny thing is that the "modern standby" was supposed to improve the wakeup time from a couple of seconds to a faction of a second. But effectively it turned the wakeup into 10 seconds because you have to disable the modern standby and use hibernate instead.

The whole idea of modern standby is brain dead.

My laptop isn't a cellphone, I don't need it periodically waking up to check emails or whatever, it can do it when I open the lid.

Thankfully my laptop has an option to force S3 only in the bios.

The problem with this is, you can force the laptop to use other sleep modes, but either a) dell disables those modes entirely in the BIOS b) windows update resets the sleep mode

That won't always save you, there have definitely been bugs where it tries to hibernate but gets stuck

Recently bought a 7390 latitude (2-3 years old). amazing machine for basic remote desktop and basic office work etc. Battery lasts 10+ hrs on light work.

Had the sleep states turned on and would randomly die at 60% battery while sleeping. Found out its a long standing bug in dells. Sometimes it just restarts the machine so if its in a bag it will just keep running.

Turned of sleep states in firmware and instead now it goes to hibernate on sleep. No random behavior or shutdown.

Its mind boggling this shit used to work totally fine on older laptops, no idea what changed.

The laptops can enter a special standby mode that keeps the network alive, so they will immediately resume when the lid opens. This means, of course, that the laptops never actually shut down and run constantly.

true, but i actually turn that explicitly off on physical network settings in windows.

My guess is windows will apparently not let u control such things, as the advertising data pipe has to be alive no matter what. Microsft seems to be both google and apple at the same time, selling ads and hardware.

I'm really sorry that didn't work for you.

Had the same with Apple. An update made it quit sleeping correctly when using a microsd card to expand storage (it worked fine at first).

Me too.

The Yubikey nano -- the little one meant to be permanently left in a usb slot your laptop -- absolutely nukes the battery in my mac, draining it on "sleep" to zero within a day or so. Infuriating incompetence.

Huh. What version Mac/OSX are you using? I've had a Yubikey Nano plugged into various iterations of a MacBook Pro for years and haven't noticed this. The worst battery killer for me is Firefox.

10.14, late 2019 16 inch mbp

I thought I was being crazy and that maybe something was brushing it, so I let it sit in a moat on my desk immediately after booting. Full battery discharge in sleep in under 30 hours.

Without the yubikey, a full weekend sitting on my desk from a full charge leaves a reported 100% of battery.

That’s not quite possible. I wish 10.14 supported the 2019 rMBP 16 but alas..

How did you get macOS 10.14 running on that MacBook Pro?

I had a dell laptop around 2012 that had this same problem, on Windows 7. I also remember holding it up to my ear to confirm it shut down haha. And it did wake itself up and overheat in my bag a couple times. I've just avoided Dell ever since when I can. My current work laptop is some sort of Dell XPS, but at least I didn't pay for it.

Writing this from my 2019 XPS 15 7590 i9 with (extended) 64 GB RAM. The OLED display quality is still the best any laptop can offer, but that's where it ends. Had countless issues with sleep, reboots after being "killed in sleep" for going over Windows sleep "battery drain limit" (can be increased in registry but hey), wifi/bt issues after wake-up, short battery endurance, fan noise (mitigated by undervolting w/ ThrottleStop). (In case I may sound too dramatic, check their forums: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/bd-p/XPS)

Then there's the classic Windows Laptop "goodness" like bad keyboards, bad trackpad (too much scrolling, jagged scrolling, bad trackpad surface), necessity to emulate Linux/Git/Wsl/Cygwin for any real dev work, having elaborate install.txt procedures for setting up a new laptop.

I wanted to have a "beefy" machine but since I can now do my play things on Google Colab (and my work on company's Macbook), I just ordered the last year's M1 Macbook Air and I'm done with this Dante's Inferno of Windows Laptop ecosystem. Windows 11 just reinforced my disbelief that Microsoft can produce usable operating system before our civilization reaches Singularity.

I'll chime in as well from my 2020 XPS 17. This issue is incredibly frustrating. It's worth switching over, however I don't really know where to go for a premium laptop. I'm not very interested in a Mac. HP and Lenovo have given me tons of problems in the past (which is why I switched to Dell). From this thread it seems like several other vendors have similar problems to this Dell one. What options are there?

I'll be frank, the MacBooks are overpriced, and do have some of their own issues, but they're actually still the best choice.

At the very least based on my own experience you should avoid HP Elitebooks, and Microsoft Surfaces, also Asus Zenbooks, and Dell Inspirons.

...As you can tell from that list I've tried very hard to avoid paying the premium for a MacBook before giving in. They're still not perfect, but they're good enough that I am never going back to a Windows laptop.

"Overpriced" and "the best choice" can not be used in a single line. Looks like this premium goes not for nothing.

I really like the Lenovo X1s with Linux, no issues, great luck with hardware so far (on my second one). I also have a MacBook Pro, and I gotta say I like the Lenovo with fedora better.

Same, use a macbook and carbon X1.

Only thing the Macbook does noticeably better is speaker quality which isn't surprising given the size difference.

How about sleep, trackpad support/configurability, battery endurance, 4k display support, external monitor support? I've seen complaints about all of these wrt Linux on X1.

Macbook now has the M1 going for it.

I run WSL2 on my X1, everything works perfectly.

apt-get is much nicer than brew and all its stupid cask/taps stuff that takes forever for packages to install.

With wslutils installed I have "open" and "pbcopy" equivalents configured which were the only 2 things missing from osx that I use a lot.

Have you considered Framework? They're laptops are almost completely modular. The problem with laptops is that they don't have a dedicated GPU yet. But they're otherwise interesting.

These days the Microsoft laptops (v4) are surprisingly fantastic machines. Great screen, battery life, trackpad, etc. I've owned so many laptops, but MS seems to have surpassed even Dell is net build quality imho.

I've been buying Dell Vostro laptops and they certainly feel premium and have decent battery life. This years model removed the SATA port where you could expand storage with a cheap HDD, but it does have an extra M.2 drive and expandable memory.

> like bad keyboards, bad trackpad (too much scrolling, jagged scrolling, bad trackpad surface)

Curious to hear more about the keyboard / trackpad issues you're seeing. I have an older XPS model, which has the best laptop keyboard I've ever used (better than any MacBook I've tried) and a great trackpad too (I haven't used a MacBook from the last several years, but it's hard to beat physical left/right buttons).

Has the touchpad changed? Mine is extremely smooth, it does not stick to your finger at all, and has no texturing on the surface like cheap laptops sometimes do.

Furthermore, I'm curious if you've tried Linux on the laptop at all. In the past, most issues I had with "bad" trackpads (other than when the surface itself was bad) were resolved by installing Linux, where the drivers simply worked better than on Windows and were generally more configurable (although the advent of libinput changed that).

My son has the same model. The keyboard is not that bad, I even like it. But issues with the sleep mode and with the trackpad - they overweight everything and I’ve bought an M1 Air for him.

My 7590's keyboard is the polar opposite of the new Macbook butterfly keyboard which is considered too slim/tight/short-key-travel -- the Dell's keyboard is harder to press, they keys wiggle (this is exacerbated on the big keys like the Spacebar) -- a fast touch typer will hate this keyboard. (And even much more so after getting used to the Macbook's short travel keyboard (2018 mbp pro)).

Interesting, last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.

And you are actually right that the trackpad surface on XPS in particular is actually one of the better/best ones. However options for tweaking it in Windows settings is non-existent, and so it is much slower than the mac trackpad, and my finger end up fatigued from casual scrolling, which never happens on mac. (This (trackpad scrolling speed) is tweakable eg in VSCode but not in Chrome etc.)

> a fast touch typer will hate this keyboard

Interesting. On this site, I see nothing but complaints about the Macbook short travel keyboards. I have not used one for more than a few minutes, but I am a fast touch typist and I like the greater travel with my XPS keyboard. It's a whole lot better feeling than the 2014 MBP I have compared it with; the latter has more travel than newer Macbooks but has a mushy, foam-like feel to its switches rather than the firmer, actuator-like feel that I'm used to with the XPS.

> last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.

This depends a lot on the features you're expecting, and also whether you have a touchpad that's compatible with good drivers or not. For a long time the multi-touch story on Linux wasn't great, so users coming from Macs and expecting to use 3, 4 or 5 finger gestures were inevitably disappointed. I find myself not really using these gestures, even when I use a Mac (I bind keyboard shortcuts to my most used functions with Karabiner instead), so it doesn't matter much to me.

Rather, I'm comparing the behavior of a certain class of low quality touchpad that you find in cheap laptops. In Windows, I've seen these touchpads jerk around, not really detect your finger properly, have weird acceleration ramps, and have bad palm rejection - seemingly issues with the touchpad itself, yet become vastly improved when switching the laptop over to Linux, provided that you could use the synaptics driver.

Stuff like trackpad scrolling speed has of course always been configurable system wide on Linux, along with many other features. It's even available in the libinput driver, which (unfortunately) got rid of most of the "knobs" for touchpads.

> Windows 11 just reinforced my disbelief that Microsoft can produce usable operating system before our civilization reaches Singularity.

You may be right; I can't believe it's been 13 years since Microsoft's last go at writing the kernel for it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)). So sad they gave up :(

I got a new laptop earlier this year and I was eyeing this exact one. I was going to wipe out windows and put linux on it(as is tradition with me) but I ended up settling for an Asus once again. It seems like you can get a lot more bang for the buck with Asus in Europe. Can't say it has been an entirely smooth ride for one or two reasons(running a patched kernel driver for the screen backlight) but after reading your comment, I am glad I made that call.

Im currently in the process of getting a framework laptop setup using arch+wayland+sway and I'm not convinced it's any better on this side. Something as simple as a screensaver requires xwayland which is frustrating.

I can recommend the M1 air which has surprised me the other direction in hardly using any battery while sleeping. The prior Intel macbook used a lot more.

> listen until the fan goes off after closing the lid

I knew I wasn't the only one who does it!

FWIW my (Intel) MacBook does the same. Sometimes it just doesn't go to sleep when I close the lid and it's not clear why, so I have to listen for the fans. So dumb.

Same with Linux honestly. I suspended a Linux laptop, shoved it in the bag, got on the train, little did I know that it didn't actually go into suspend.

Like WTF, if the lid is closed, the hardware should force it to suspend, not get stuck in some software. If the software doesn't respond in time then force the damn thing off.

It heated up like mad, even too hot to touch. Was worried about the possibility of a Lithium battery explosion. If that happened who do you sue, Canonical or the laptop manufacturer?

My sample size is 1, but so far I am not impressed that my wife's M1 MBP didn't last more than 4 months before needing a full mainboard replacement. She's not a power-user and I would expect a "pro" laptop to be more resilient than this (even in the exceptional cases).

> 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?

There’s some really interesting security challenges that pop-up with Hibernation. Not sure if they blocked Apple though.

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.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/55845.html

I was referring to this.

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.

Not really, this security challenge have been solved long ago, and require a degree of involvement which makes them irrelevant for most people.

It might be slower than cold boot on machines with 32GB of RAM

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.

Yes, but this is an issue with Apple products. My old PC with not-so-fast SSD can boot (Linux and Windows) much faster than 16" MacBook Pro.

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.

Hibernation in Windows hasn't gone anywhere. I have a Dell laptop in front of me and it has hibernate in the start menu as normal.

Problem is that hibernation is slooow so people don't like to use it

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)

Edit: sorry, can't read.

No, you can't; that option is disabled. It cannot be checked. I don't know how I can state this more clearly.

"Turn on fast startup (recommended)" is checked, and that option is also disabled and can't be unchecked, despite obviously being undesirable.

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.

The checkbox is disabled by default. To enable it you have to click the "Allow advanced options" button at the top of the page.

Why though?

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.

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

Probably "big b". 3 Gb/s (small b) is approximately 350 MB/s (big b).

My 9-year-old SATA SSD does better than that.

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.

> Problem is that hibernation is slooow

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.

Depends on your definition of slow.

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.

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).

Slower than an iPad, so more people will use a tablet to do their day to day activities rather than the laptop.

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.

This.

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 should not be too slow now with SSDs clocking upwards of 3000MB/s

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.

Agree - coming back from hibernation is very fast on these machines (XPS-13 9300 here).

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.

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.

Hibernation took about three seconds on my Windows 98 SE laptop. It took three minutes on my Windows XP. It never finishes on modern Windows.

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.

I use Windows 10 Pro on Asus VivoBook 15. Hibernation takes approximately one minute.

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.

I use it every day on Windows 10. It takes about 30 seconds to go to full hibernate and 30 seconds to restore. My laptop has 32GB of RAM.

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.

> laptop overheating if being put in the backpack

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 just decided not to shutdown like usual.

This happened once or twice with Windows laptops for me (Lenovo and Asus); but each time the laptop survived. Was yours a fanless model?

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?

Good question, they do turn off the discrete GPU when it gets too 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.

How can a fan help when fresh air is nowhere for it to suck from? I even suspect fan-less models may be better prepared for such scenario.

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".

Is there even a way to make sure a MacBook is actually turt really off?

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

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)

Wow, it's quite fascinating what you non-Mac people are willing to put up with. Or maybe it's fascinating how Mac JustWorks(TM).

Read the thread just next to your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28640283

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.

> It's sad but we have to deal with it.

We can absolutely both meet reasonable innovation and deadlines with formal verification. It's just that no one wants to pay for it.

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.

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.

No, I never reboot my Mac. (For reasonable values of "never", e.g. "once every 3 months".)

ssh connections fail even with just sleep though, obviously.

I don't rely on it, but I often notice a ssh connection still working after a night with the computer being suspended.

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.

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.

Sure, but for a Mac, it's a "bug" or "faulty hardware". For XPS (and presumably many other Windows laptops), it's policy.

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.

Can confirm, this was an issue ten years ago and I can't understand why it still is a problem.

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.

> 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.

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?

Nope. I came back to MS Windows for work a couple of years ago -- it's ironically terrible at managing windows.

It does have virtual desktops now at least.

There are third-party solutions.

MS need better window management.

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.

This is one of the main reasons I just returned my XPS 13 9310 and got a Framework instead. The sleep/standby/hibernate stuff is just bad. I don’t know if it is a Dell problem or a Windows problem or what, but it’s terrible.

I’m primarily a Mac user but I haven’t had the same issue with other Windows laptops and the Dell has standby issues in Linux too so it’s just bad. And loud. And hot.

Most of my Windows laptops in the past would do this in a bag (e.g., Sony and Razor). I'd pin it on Windows, not saying it happens to all Windows laptops but Windows allows it to happen. It knows to sleep when shut, but somehow spins back up in the bag.

Same happened to me with HP and thinkpad laptops.

I know this is not sufficient evidence of the contrary, but my HP Envy 15z x360 (the one with the Ryzen 2500u processor) seems to hibernate as expected with the lid shut. Zero battery usage while hibernating on my desk or in my bag for days at a time.

Granted, this laptop is more than a couple years old at this point, so it is possible it is completely unaffected.

I primarily use MacOS and just don't understand how this can still be a seemingly common problem in 2021, when most of the world uses laptops. Shouldn't this be a top priority for Microsoft and for vendors?

Apparently it isn't, which may explain why almost every quarter Apple reports year-over-year gains in laptop sales.

If I were the boss at Microsoft, this would become a top priority. Immediately.

My MacBook Pro (2019) occasionally does this as well. I close the lid in the office, put it in my bag. When I take it out at home it’s turned off due to overheating and the battery is dead. The cause is some background process that’s preventing it going into hibernation when the lid is closed.

It happens with macbooks for me if using an sd card. It started doing it only after an update a few years back.

Agreed. This happened with my Dell laptops, ROG laptops, and Thinkpads. It's just a Windows problem.

Yup, I bought that same model (to run Linux) on a long time reputation for Dell XPS on Linux and the power management is ridiculous. Absolutely terrible. Unplugged, mine won't hold a charge for more than a day unless it's shut all the way down. It loses something like 5% of battery power an hour. A buddy has one that's previous gen and it actually sleeps correctly.

Yeah, that’s the most frustrating thing, the prior models don’t seem to have this issue. It’s a shame because the laptop is so expensive, and it’s otherwise a beautiful device.

I'm on Arch, and it gets hot in my bag when in sleep mode. Hibernate is certainly good though, since it's basically powered off, but I haven't tested because in my experience hibernation on Linux is kinda finicky to get to work flawlessly

I ended up configuring my machine to suspend to disk when the power button is hit. I would agree with the hibernation function being finicky under Linux except I ran across similar behavior under Windows, so it probably has something to do with how power management is handled on PC hardware.

Yeah, I have a feeling it is probably issues with Windows and Windows drivers AND hardware issues in general, because I have problems in Linux too.

I feel like, at least with Dell, it’s a perfect storm of bad Windows power management policies/support, bad Windows drivers (from Dell or Microsoft or both), and generally bad hardware power management at a firmware level within Linux too.

I’ve certainly had some suspend/power management issues with other Windows laptops, but nothing like this Dell. I’m about to return the Dell (taking it back today in fact) and I had it closed on a desk, plugged in, but closed, and the fans started to go insane. I opened it up and my laptop had exited suspend mode and was in some weird Dell system setting scan that I hadn’t initiated and that wasn’t scheduled to run. This literally happened between when I made my first comment and now (I’m using a different device to comment).

Meanwhile, my Framework laptop might not be as good as my MacBook Pro, but when I close it, I don’t need to worry about it turning on in my bag or have it sitting on my desk.

So I blame Dell, Microsoft, and Dell again for bad power management, poor firmware, poor drivers, and lackluster OS support. Linux could probably get some blame too, but again, I tend to think it’s bad drivers and firmware more than anything.

It's definitely a Windows issue. I've had it with non-XPS Dells and completely different brands like Eluktronics.

Microsoft calls it a Windows Feature, though. Microsoft's Modern Standby is what causes this.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...

I have this issue with my Surface Book 2, everything is MS so there's no real excuse.

Didn't notice it in the first couple years of ownership, not sure if it was because my usage patterns changed or some not-so-helpful update that made it worse, but it's really absurd that I can't predict what will happen when I close the laptop.

I did something to disable network activity from interrupting standby, which reduced the issues a bit but not consistently.

I have this issue with my Razer Blade 15.. I've gotta used to carrying my laptop in my hands now so it's not quite so much of a problem.

It's not Windows (although Microsoft did basically force it to happen).

Intel have just removed S3 sleep from the latest Tigerlake chip so there isn't an alternative.

I got my first windows laptop in 1999 (Toshiba satellite), and had 4 subsequent one’s since including HP Elitebooks and Dell Latitude Pros, and on none of them could I close the lid at a moment’s notice and start moving. I have had an Intel MacBook Air since 7 years ago, and I have never not been able to close the lid at a moment’s notice and stuff it in my backpack and get going.

This always happened with my Surface Book, a flagship Microsoft made device. I could never trust it in my backpack. WTF msft.

This is about the tenth time I’ve seen someone reference a framework laptop in the last couple of days.

Is it a new company?

Framework just started shipping their hardware, so perhaps all these mentions are people that have received their preorders (or read about people receiving their preorders). https://frame.work/

Laptop company that famous youtuber invested in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_Computer

https://frame.work/

Definitely considering it when my current X1 carbon will trespass into laptops Valhalla.

https://frame.work

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/frameworks-new-light...

Yes - https://frame.work/laptop ... Their claim to fame is their highly repairable, modular laptop that you can assemble like desktop computers.

Yes and I preordered one specifically because I want a first-class linux supported laptop with repair-ability in mind.

As far as I can tell it is living up to its hype.

1400 hn comments the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28606962

It's an Intel problem.

They just axed S3 sleep in the latest Tigerlake chips (which the 9310 use, and I assume Framework is using or will use in the future). You can't even workaround this by running Linux.

This more or less means that there isn't actually an alternative to modern standby other than hibernation at the hardware level any more (unless AMD continue to support it which there's a good chance of happening).

OK, so, overheating the laptop stresses it and will eventually damage it. Got it. Easy to understand.

Question. What is it about "being in a bag" that destroys the thermal handling? I've had my laptop in my lap spontaneously power off when it gets too hot. (Which itself makes me a bit crabby about why it didn't successfully throttle down until it could at least keep running, but that's a separate gripe.) Why doesn't the laptop in the bag also eventually turn itself off?

Laptops are equipped with thermal sensors to prevent themselves from destroying themselves already. Why aren't they working here? Why don't the sensors cut things off earlier? Why isn't this a warranty issue? Isn't my hardware's thermal shutoff mechanism defective if it lets this happen?

Thermal sensors measure temperature in specific points / small areas. There are a finite number of these and they do not cover the entire CPU / GPU / motherboard / etc.

If one puts a massive load on a CPU, the temperature spikes quickly and widely across enough of the die that the sensors work as expected and the system throttles / shuts down.

If one puts a small load on the CPU for a long period of time, areas that are not covered by sensors may overheat, damaging the CPU. This is true for other components in the system, too.

If the laptop is out in the air, convection will remove enough heat to prevent these invisible "hot spots". The bag acts as a blanket. Over hours, the laptop cooks parts of itself to death[0] in ways the system cannot detect.

[0] Or damages them in ways that make them unstable.

Edited to add [0]

Do they not put thermal sensors in the CPU? My laptop gives a temperature for each individual CPU core. Whenever I start a heavy CPU task I instantly see a temperature spike. The theory that the thermometers are in potentially useless spots doesn't match my observations.

My apologies for not being clearer that this is not only about the CPU. It's about all the components in the laptop, not just the CPU. I used the CPU in the example because it's a component most of us are familiar with.

It's not that the sensors are in useless spots. They're the best sensors in the best spots the designers could make work for the price point they're trying to hit.

To answer your CPU question: CPUs have thermal sensors, probably the highest number in the machine as they work with clock speed scaling and the CPU is in the top 2 most expensive components. But each of these sensors is covering a large area, which may not heat up evenly under low loads.

A heavy load is the easy case and the one they're designed to detect: the CPU core is fully loaded, it's generating maximum heat, and the entire core area will heat up quickly.

A light load is harder to detect. Depending on die design and sensor placement, one corner of a core may heat up in a way the sensor doesn't detect well at low CPU loads.

These sensors are also only accurate "enough". This corner of a core may have to get to 110C before the sensor realizes it's overheating and throttles it. It could sit for hours at 105C, very slowly toasting itself.

But CPUs are, generally, actively cooled or have large heatsinks, so this is less of an issue in practice... though wrapping a laptop in a blanket overnight might make it an issue.

To move on beyond CPUs: There are many thermally sensitive components in a laptop. Some of them have thermal sensors. Others do not. Almost all of them rely on convection to shed heat. Leaving the laptop effectively "on" and in a bag overnight may bring them to a temperature that damages them.

Light load over a long period of time will result in a fairly uniform temperature distribution. It sounds like the system must have no "general" temperature sensor measuring the air temperature inside the machine (or chassis temperature).

Probably some small component on the logic board generates a bit of heat, requiring a certain "internal ambient" temperature, and the designers (never having thought to test it with restricted airflow) never noticed the implicit assumptions they had made.

A single sensor by the exhaust fan would be an excellent proxy for the T anywhere in the laptop.

The really hot stuff have sensors themselves, so if anything else is hot it will be revealed in the exhaust

An exhaust fan doesn't work in a bag.

That is why the temp sensor would quickly register high heat and shut down the system.

Thank you. Good point.

I still wonder if machines should be designed to deal with this, and would still be tempted to call it a "warranty issue" that they didn't handle a scenario they're clearly aware of.

On the other hand it would also be very nice if software just didn't decide it can unsuspend a laptop whenever, and then apparently do hours of work without ever re-suspending, so... I guess you could say I've got enough blame to ladle around for everybody.

I had a Dell XPS 9310 until about 3 months ago when suddenly one of the fans died on me for no obvious reasons while I was in quarantine. Given that the fans are now soldered onto the mainboard, Dell was offering me to repair this for almost the same amount I paid for the whole laptop 2 years earlier. Needless to say that this was the last time I will buy a Dell.

Since I am located in Asia, I also went to one of the unauthorized repair shops to see if they could offer a cheaper way to get this done. When I walked in, I saw two customers in front of me with Dells. When it was my turn, I also asked which laptop brands are having the most and least issues. Not surprisingly, Lenovo and Dell rank very high. The Taiwanese (Asus, Acer) as well as Razer and hp were considered of higher quality.

Apple as well. I have a 2018 15" Macbook Pro with problems:

  - The battery is dying
  - The touchbar flickers whenever it is 'off' - a hardware fault that requires the full top case to replaced[1] - Quotes of $400-1200.

And things that aren't technically problems but still have the same, can't do anything about it stuck with the problem vibe:

  - I keep running out of space, but it's soldered to the logic board 
  - Keyboard is one of those shitty butterfly keyboards
  - It's always heat throttling

Granted, I might be able to get some of them fixed, but not without major inconvenience of being without my laptop for some period of time.

I've used Macs since the Apple Mac IIx, but I really hate the can't fix your own computer thing that has taken over in the last few years, for both Apple and others.

If Framework[2] offered a 15" or 17" version, I would be there in a heartbeat, but the 13" is just too small considering I don't use an external monitor.

[1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2017-mbp-touchbar-flash... [2]: https://frame.work

I've been using my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) for the last 7 years, fortunately without any issues! I've never had to have any repairs or replacement done to it.

A small dent and some scratches in the lid are the worst problems I have.

I have been holding out over the entire touchbar, keyboard and other debacles and will probably go for the new updated Pro model by the end of the year.

Let's hope my next purchase lasts as long as this machine has :)

With the M1 Macs Apple have done quite a lot to address these issues.

The M1 MacBook Air I’m using feels as reliable and cool as mid 2000 MacBook. Complete night and day difference to the hot mess which was my previous 2018 MacBook Pro.

I still wish Framework would scale faster and start selling the the EU today. But building a hardware company is slow and hard.

My GF has a M1 mac and is quite happy with it. I have a problem rewarding Apple with another purchase, given the dismal performance of this machine.

The 2018 mac was a top of the line purchase. I think it came to about $5000 AUD if memory serves. It's essentially worthless now because I can't sell it in it's current state.

I might cave when they update the 16in to M1X sometime soon, but I won't be happy about it.

There was a period of time when Apple really seemed to have lost their way with the MacBooks. I had a 2013 that was flawless. Then the lease was up and my company sent me a 2017 model to replace it. That machine was never much good. Randomly slow, awful keyboard, etc. Luckily the battery decided to become a balloon, and so my replacement is a newer 16-inch MBP. The new MBP seems to have addressed all of the stupidity that was going on in 2017 and 2018. And I bought a 2020 M1 MBP for myself, and it has also been quite solid. I don't want to say that Apple necessarily fixed all of their stupidity or really learned anything, but someone there still appears to give a shit.

My laptop battery and full top case (potentially including the touch bar - I'm not sure) were replaced when the keyboard was replaced under the keyboard service program: https://support.apple.com/keyboard-service-program-for-mac-n...

Go into an Apple store and say a few of your keys are double-pressing sometimes.

I'm trying to think back to when Dell made a 'good' laptop. Maybe the D630? Lenovo was still better, but what Dell sells now is just terrible.

You have to weight brands with the most issues vs market dominance vs likelihood of being seen by someone who observes the problem.

If most laptops are Dells, then most problems will be on Dell machines, even if a niche brand is lower reliability.

If most Apple laptops are taken to an Apple store, then a PC laptop repair shop won't see problems with Apple laptops.

And so on.

That is correct. However, according to a quick Google search, each hp, Lenovo, and Dell produce roughly the same number of laptops each year. Therefore the technician's statement about hp's being of better quality should weigh heavier.

Does that presumably global production match the local distribution where the anecdote was relayed?

What proportion are on business contracts vs privately owned, where business laptop problems would go through the IT department?

What are the historical distributions, assuming that older laptops are more likely to be brought to a third party rather than OEM for repair?

What if less reliable laptops bricked very soon after going out of warranty, and more reliable laptops limped into a long tail?

Anecdotally, I know three people including myself who’ve had ASUS machines die on them right out of warranty protection, and I do not recommend them at all.

And here I just posted a comment in an unrelated thread about my Asus laptop from a decade ago still going strong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28648872

For me it's Acer users that always have defects on their laptops. Someone else I know swears by Toshiba. Given how many different opinions there are out there, I feel like we just can't tell which brands are good without doing actual research, and probably we'd have to segregate by things like price band or series and perhaps even by year as teams or executives come and go.

I will never buy a Dell XPS laptop again. The exterior build quality seems very good, but the internals are such a mess.

I cannot count how many times I have been biking home from work and heard in my headphones "Two devices connected", realizing that my Dell XPS had woken up and would - once again - be red hot when I arrived home and pulled it out of my bag.

I've had three generations of the XPS 13. The first I had had a few issues, but fixable. (Even though I agree, this shouldn't even have occurred) The second one was flawless. The last one was worse than the first and it's my last.

I've set my sights on Lenovo now. X1 Carbon is supposed to be really good for Linux and you can buy it with Ubuntu or no OS installed.

The Carbon had its share of issues

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/Lenov...

The latest BIOS supposedly fixes most of them

I hate x1 carbons with windows. The t series has been much better but I think carbones are ok with ubuntu.

I returned my X1 Carbon due to unsolvable audio latency/jitter issues on Windows. Out of the box, just watching YouTube was impossible.

Same experience. I can't understand how a company like Dell isn't capable of avoiding such design mistakes with their laptop line.

Just curious, why would you keep putting the standby laptop in your backpack after this had occurred more than once? It sounds like hardware russian roulette.

This is unrelated, but do you find that you lose your sense of awareness when cycling with headphones in? I can see the appeal in a rural road or otherwise less busy area, but in downtown Toronto, you'll die if you do it.

Even on country roads, occasionally cars (and cyclists!) will pass to close, and one errant swerve will end in disaster.

I forget which country it was, but they had a national campaign (including radio ads and one pop song) that encouraged cyclists to ride with only one earbud inserted.

I bike to work with a dell xps 9343 and don't have any more problems with it waking from sleep unexpectedly. powercfg -lastwake and powercfg -waketimers can show what is causing the computer to wake up, and you can disable some of the modern standby settings like wake words with cortana or bluetooth. The same thing can happen with any other laptop, the default intel/microsoft settings leave a lot of possibilities and I have run into a similar issue with an X1 and a t580.

This is not exclusive to Dell.

Many laptop makers started to intentionally disable S3 for the "enhanced" S2. This was/is true of Lenovo as well: for roughly 6 months S3 was disabled completely on the then-new 3rd generation Yoga X1 laptops and Carbon counterparts. It was re-enabled thanks to linux user's uproar under the "legacy sleep mode" umbrella.

Why would you go as far as disabling it, is beyond me. S3 is the sleep mode I expect on a laptop. S2 sounds useful for tablet/phone behavior.

Hibernation doesn't of course suffer from this issue, and I never experienced this on any laptop with S3 sleep.

Of course, if you shut down your laptop and put it immediately in a bag, temperature will raise temporarily even if the system is off due to the inability to dissipate heat. You should be aware of this, and avoid immediately bagging the laptop just after rebuilding the kernel ;)

It's not like the laptop generates any heat once you turn it off. It's more like its not vented out and is absorbed by other components that normally do not get warm. The total heat is not any greater.

Clickbaity title. It says

> 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 page has been edited and no longer mentions warranty at all.

Submitted title was "Putting a DELL XPS laptop in a bag voids its warranty". We've changed it to a shortened version of what you quoted. Thanks!

I leave my MacBook’s lid closed for a week and I can open it to maybe 5% battery drain.

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.

My 2017 MBP that was fully spec’d out is both the most expensive and worst laptop I’ve ever owned.

-Rarely ever goes to sleep

-It’s the same model Facebook returned a few thousand of because it randomly voltage surges the USB-C ports and fries stuff plugged into it. Apple refuses to acknowledge this, even though a bad voltage surge blew out the left speaker.

-Keyboards been replaced four times

-NVRAM needs to be reset weekly

-Charging it is super fun. If it still has a charge, you get to randomly pick a USB-C port to plug the charger in. If it’s not that one, power cycle the charger for 30 seconds and try a new port

-Given it never goes to sleep and has no charging indicator, when it’s dead (most of the time I open it) you get to play the charging port roulette, except you have to keep it plugged in a few minutes to see if it gets a charge, before power cycling the charging brick.

-A small half circle of glass popped out of the bottom of the display, where it meets the hinge when it was running an intense CPU load

I'm missing the relevance here? Are you just trying to point out that MacBooks are also imperfect?

I had a 2017 as well. And before that a 2013. And since then a 2019 16-inch and a 2020 M1. Yes, the 2017 sucked balls in ways that I can't even begin to count. The 2013 was f*cking flawless. I've similarly had almost zero problems with the 2019 16-inch MBP or my 2020 M1. There's just something especially crappy about the 2017s, and I doubt you'd find many people who'd seriously disagree about that.

Yep the 2017 was bad. The 2013s were very good, but the 2019 16-inch... I had 3 replacements and it still sucked; it got so hot I could bake pizzas on it and no matter how Apple tried to blame me (my usage patterns), when I got to the store they couldn't make it stop and replaced it. My friends (not of great statistical value, I know) had exactly the same issues. In the end I got the m1 (not pro) and it is actually cold all the time which is unpleasant on the wrists in winter. I don't use my laptop for very intensive things; even my programming stuff doesn't take a lot of power so I have no clue why the 19 kept blowing up, but I read online it's a pretty common issue.

Oh yeah I loved my 2010 and 2014. Looking forward to the M1X. The 2017 is just a special kind of awful

Have we really evolved to the state that laptop portability is an extra feature and not part of the design criteria for the modern laptop? That the sleep capability of laptops, present in various forms since the 90s, should no longer be used even though it's the default when the lid is closed?

I've been a fan of Dell for many years, against so much evidence of what a joke they've become, but this issue may finally tip me over the edge.

Any name brand PCs you trust to buy for family members who want a name brand and the perceived value that provides? (Besides Apple, I guess).

> Any name brand PCs you trust to buy for family members who want a name brand and the perceived value that provides? (Besides Apple, I guess).

It feels like you might've answered your own question. For better or worse, most of this kind of stuff "just works" in the Apple ecosystem.

I've had my 2018 MBP either fail to go to sleep correctly or wake up during sleep twice while in a bag. When I got home it was blazing hot. I'm not alone in this, you can see threads of people reporting similar things on Apple's support forums or even in this thread. Apple isn't immune to this either.

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.

You’re not really supposed to bring a phone that close to your skin, otherwise you might exceed safe radiation levels.

That is simple not how non-ionizing radiation works.

Found the guy that holds the phone a bit from their face and talks into the edge like it's a sandwich

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.

[citation needed]

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

Well username checks out ig?

Microsoft has a serious issue with thinking it's ok to wake up from sleep mode. I added a script to the task scheduler to resleep if woken up by anything other than the power button[1]. In retrospect, the wake ups were either to perform updates or some kind of bug related to transitioning to hibernation which ends up with the pc idling on[2]. Both of which would result in the classic hot bag / dead battery situation.

[1] https://github.com/KarlTheCool/NeverWake

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/gpdwin/comments/iqmdeo/windows_kept...

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.

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..!)

Note, this isn't Dell specific - the loss of s3 sleep is coming from Intel and Microsoft. The idea is that S0ix is supposed to "replace" s3, but (at least on Linux) it's a horrible mess.

I have a System76/Clevo - ostensibly one of the better choices for running Linux - and S0ix at best drains like ~5% of my battery overnight, and at worst it doesn't work at all.

Some will quip that I shouldn't expect sleep to work on Linux anyway, but this defies my experience with S3 on Linux (which has "just worked" for the last decade for me) so this is a substantial downgrade.

Do yourself a favor and avoid Tiger Lake and newer if you care about reliable sleep.

Just got a i5-1135g7 system can't make ubuntu to wake up my screen. seems like it won't be fixed. and windows s3 wake is just very slow, need 5-8s to wake.

I've had this happen to me once with an XPS13-9360.

I use Linux on my laptops exclusively, and it was supposed to enter S3 just fine. But after I closed the lid, something went wrong, and instead of suspending it actually started hogging 100% of CPU. I was unaware of it, and put it into my backpack. Shortly after, I had noticed that my back felt unusually warm. When I got it out, it was infuriatingly hot, almost scalding. I kept pressing down the power button until it turned off, and held it in the open air until both it and the inside of my backpack cooled off enough. Thankfully, it was a cold winter evening, so it didn't take very long.

It's been 3 years now, the laptop works to this day nicely, even after suffering a bent edge on the screen assembly after falling down.

There's a whole bunch of reasons I keep disabling modern standby on my laptop. (And that's 'keep disabling' because either Dell or Microsoft keep switching it back on after updates - note this is a Windows feature, not a Dell-specific thing).

[Edit: In addition, the reg key to disable it keeps changing from release to release...]

The two most annoying ones:

1 - while in the middle of a VoIP call via a wireless headset, lock laptop while walking away from desk to make a cup of tea in the next room, 30 seconds later laptop goes into 'standby', cutting off the call...

2 - WiFi never wakes back up properly out of modern standby, either disable/re-enable, or disconnect/reconnect works to bring it back perfectly ok.

Dell sells official Dell laptop bags, backpacks, and cases: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/carrying-cases/ac/7301

"Keep your laptop, tablet and everyday essentials protected with sleek backpacks designed to blend in to any environment."

I suspect that a lawsuit against their denial of warranty for putting a laptop into a backpack would go pretty well.

It's not that you can't put it in a bag, you just need to shutdown the laptop completely before doing so.

The issue is most people don't use their laptops like that. My laptop basically only shuts down doing updates. While I can sort of understand Dells logic, it's also ignoring how people will normally use their laptops. It's really something Dell should adresse in their coming generations of laptops. No amount of writing will get users to change their behavior and even if Dell is correct, it will make their laptops seem inferior if they break because you transportet them in a bag while hibernating.

> if they break because you transportet them in a bag while hibernating.

Power consumption during hibernation is supposed to be zero - that is the concept of hibernation. What's happening there?

"Modern Standby"

Good language example here: "Modern" is nearly always an advocacy word. Literally it just means "up to date", but in fact it is almost always used in the sense of "this should be the successor of what you currently have, you should feel bad about what I designate as outdated". Sometimes this is justifiable, but...

The entire fucking point in a laptop is to be portable. If you _have_ to shut it down completely before putting it in a bag, it’s not a laptop as any sane person expects it to have that ability.

It’s absolutely astonishing that Dell, Microsoft and friends leave walk over in the laptop industry like this. “Oh we decided users don’t really want to be able to close the lid and go home.” ??????

Not going to lie but Apple have put pretty high standards on what people expect to work with all laptops nowadays, and many OEMs seem unable or unwilling to try to catch up.

It's funny how the competition tries to copy the success of the Macbook line but fails on such an elementar design. I really wish they would succeed and make laptops not made by Apple suck less.

I guess it's difficult when you don't control the full stack. Windows is a bit of a mess nowadays to be honest, you will probably get better luck with a linux laptop

Apple laptops have their own problems, like delivering mild electric shocks from their exposed-metal cases. Unfortunately the trend of copying Apple has lead to other manufacturers having exposed-metal cases, and inheriting this flaw.

Yes, I have noticed this too. Still, to me that is very minor compared to some people's descriptions of literally red hot XPS's in their backpacks here...

I had an electrical engineer tell me this was more or less inevitable. I thought that sounded very strange.

I suspect that without complete galvanic isolation (which would require a transformer in the power supply), you can’t avoid this phenomenon.

Although why you can avoid it probably depends on what country you’re in. But as a general rule it pretty tricky to get a true “zero volt” reference out of an AC socket. (You can’t know if the neutral is actually zero-volts, or just a different phase, or if a fault elsewhere has caused your neutral to drift slightly. Equally you can’t rely on the ground, because if you started leaking current down it, it would trip the ground current leak protector and turn your house off).

Which means the ground the power supply presents to the device is alway gonna be a little bit off.

But laptop chargers _do_ have transformers, and inductors for that matter -- they're switching power supplies! I actually had a problem with this on my MacBook to the degree that I would simply connect a wire between the protective earth and a radiator I had. It worked, strangely enough. It's also perfectly safe to do.

I stand corrected, the power supplies you find for electronics do have transformers in them that provide galvanic isolation.

I guess I’ve spent too much time looking at high voltage (measured in kV) power electronics used in HVDC transmission, it didn’t occur to me that household electronics would use a slightly different approach.

I have a 2020 MBP, and it's as shitty as any high end Windows laptop I've used.

The thermals are awful under moderate CPU use, the fan spins when using an external monitor, the battery vampire drains when it's shut for an extended time instead of saving memory to disk and shutting off.

I think what really happens is people compare $1k Dells with $3k Apples.

I'm looking forward to an M1X MBP, though. That may legitimately outclass any Windows device.

I've never had any of that happen with either of my $1000 MacBook Pros, from 2013 and 2017 respectively. Now I just got a 2020 M1 MBP, we'll see how that goes but it seems great so far

Same thing with my MBP from 2018.

Regarding the problem discussed in the article, the Dell could easily cost $3,000, and the problem would not exist a $1000 MacBook, even an Intel one.

In this case, I think it’s Apple’s proper prioritization of features. Probably also that Apple is able to do this because they don’t have to work on dozens of different models at the same time.

It’s amazing to me that no major PC manufacturers have really done this yet.

Don't get me wrong, the Windows laptops I've used had their own list of things too.

The MBP from my perspective is just more of the same. Not better, not worse, but different.

The problem discussed in the article happens for MacBooks too

Source? I've been putting my 2017 MBP in a bag daily for 4+ years now and never had this issue.

Background tasks on Mac laptops can create a similar problem, but they are largely software created, and rarely out-of-the-box scenarios. Enterprise security tools like endpoint protection scanners and VPN clients made available for Mac but seemingly built in a different power state mentality have been shown to interrupt sleep mode and drain battery. I've also heard mixed reports of different generations behaving badly, and I haven't used all of them. In college my MBP lived in my backpack. You finish a class, close the lid watch the light change and away you go. Nothing will wake it until you open it.

Now with enterprise scanning tools running for "security" they check in daily or hourly to look for new threat signatures or what have you, no matter the power state, no matter the network state, no matter if its in a bag. Likely because the bulk of the tool was just ported from a world where you turn it off or the computer isn't off.

I had the exact overheating in a bag problem described here with my 2012 15" MBP within days of buying it. It had all sorts of sleep problems for a very long time.

My husband always had the same problem with his Macbook Pro. Slow, unresponsive and loud as hell under any light load.

Things are a bit better now that he bought an iMac, but for that price I could have assembled 2 excellent desktop PCs with a good screen.

Posted in another comment thread, but my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) has been awesome! No issues, no repairs or replacements and still going strong.

Maybe I got lucky but I really hope my next machine (probably going to buy the next 16" pro) will last as long.

I have the same laptop, it works pretty decently. However: YOU WILL NOT HAVE MACOS MONTEREY, because Apple decided seven years is enough.

Manufactured obsolescence.

I don’t think 7 years of major OS upgrades and support is really a good example of planned obsolescence…

Why not?

Windows 7 for example had a support lifetime of about 10 years. Any red hat release has a support lifetime of 10 years plus another 3 or 4 years of extended support for releases since 2010.

I agree that 7 years is not little, but it is not much either.

Well this is not really comparing equivalents.

Apple too has a good track record of releasing security updates for versions of OSX that will run on 10 year old hardware, regardless of whether you can update that hardware to the latest OS.

Many PC OEMs completely abandon security updates for drivers and firmware when their systems go out of warranty, if not immediately after they're discontinued. I had this issue with my last Thinkpad which was less than 2 years old.

You’re comparing software and hardware. I can comfortably say that most stock 7 year old laptops would not do well running Windows 10.

But more to the point, it is a true rarity to find manufacturers that provide support that far out for their devices. If we’re bemoaning planned obsolescence, Apple is not the poster boy for it (in my opinion)

Luckily I didn't say planned obsolescence, I said manufactured - because that's precisely what it is, Apple is well known for this type of behavior. Introduce candy, don't allow old hardware to run it, pretend like it's a hardware issue. Problem is, they do this for features that demonstrably don't require better hardware, such as the animations in the weather app for the iPhone.

It's very obvious what it's about, make "old" hardware feel outdated and force the customer's hand.

I mean, again, 7 years is a long enough timeline that I can’t really feel any negative opinions here. And “force” is much less relevant if we’re discussing what you call “candy.” Apple still pushes security updates for old macOS versions, so obsolescence isn’t even the right word to use, right?

Inducements to buy new hardware is a company’s life blood, and the methodology you’ve outlined seems like the tamest way to do so.

If you went back in time to the sixties and said you spent several months disposable income on an electronic device that you only expect to work for a couple of years with zero ability to repair, they would think you were mad.

The current scheme is designed to extract our disposable income as much as possible. You are given a trivially better deal by Apple, but it’s still very much a raw deal.

Can you really choose not to have a smartphone? No. It’s a necessity of modern life just as a car is for many. This tilts the balance in favor of the manufacturer, you’ll buy one anyway.

I'm still dailying a 2015 MacBook Pro and I've literally only started considering upgrading in the next year or so. Apple have their faults, but the hardware isn't bad at all in my opinion.

That's the pre-2016 MBP life. Still very happy with mine from 2013. The new M1-based ones are probably going to be good again, just in time for an upgrade, but we'll see.

I'm along-term Mac laptop user, and your experience doesn't track to mine at all.

I've never had one of mine get hot in a bag. Wake from sleep is nearly instant, and always has been.

I will cop to hearing the fans more often since I switched to running two 4K screens with it, but I'm not sore about that.

But I didn't list either of those issues? Are you replying to the correct person?

> I have a 2020 MBP, and it's as shitty as any high end Windows laptop I've used.

The whole post is about Dell XPS laptops not being able to be used in a bag so when you said "it's as shitty" we could assume you were also talking about those issues.

Only if you're assuming Windows laptops all have the same issues. In my experience, they're all different.

I'm sure that's part of the reason they've decided to make their own CPUs. My 2020 M1 has thermals similar to my iPhone.

I have had all the same issues with intel macs. My M1 macbook pro fixed every single one of those issues. It feels like a laptop with a nuclear reactor for a battery that creates absolutely no heat.

This is absolutely a problem on some Macs too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304628

Does it void your warranty, though?

No, because for macs it’s a bug, while for dells it’s literally the engineered behaviour of the device

Yes and no. Speaking of hibernation/standby/wakeup, that just works (TM). Also the chassis is more robust than classical PC laptops - although many manufacturers have catched up. On the other hand the keyboards have mixed quality, CPU/GPU model and choice has been questionable (below average performance). Also other manufacturers don't seem to have problems building "always-on" systems when it comes to tablets or smartphones. Because this is essentially what modern Macbooks are, some weird fusion of a laptop and a standard consumer appliance. (It works like a stereo) So I'd argue Apple has been focussing on the latter and ignored performance/storage requirements which is actually more practical if you really carry the laptop around a lot.

It's not really Apple alone. Everyone has a smartphone and everyone expects it to just work when they put their smartphone display to sleep and then stuff the phone in their jeans pocket.

>Apple have put pretty high standards on what people expect to work with all laptops nowadays

Linux too. I have a Dell XPS Developer edition with Ubuntu. When I close the lid, it simply goes to sleep and doesn't wake up again until I tell it to.

I have to charge my Macbook using the port on one side and not the other because its thermal management isn't good.

My 2015 mbp is usually solid. Twice I've put it in my bag only to take it our 45 minutes later being too hot to handle.

Next thing you know, they'll be telling you that you can't use the device on top of your lap...

Try playing games when your legs block the GPU fans! Only question is whether your legs become insufferably hot before the GPU shuts down! In my case, it was usually the GPU

You joke but I definitely remember seeing "notebook PCs" coming with notices to not use them on your lap because of excessive heat to both the device and your lap.

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.

Dells were the only laptops I ever encountered that you could bend. It’s amazing anyone other then starving college kids ever used them.

I have Thinkpad (x230 iirc) that reliably crashes if you lift it up from one side only.

My X240 started to crash a year ago when i lift it up from left side only, right side is ok

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?

> Nowadays, the base of the laptop has bowed, causing the trackpad to unglue and jut out at an angle.

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.

I suspect you are absolutely right!

It's really not hard to replace the battery yourself, no need to send it back to factory.

But you do have the option if you don't want to do it yourself nor go to a repair shop

> I know what laptop I'm getting next. And it won't be a dell.

Tell me about these greener pastures!

I think I'm gonna go for one of these: https://frame.work

Pretty unproven pastures, but have heard nothing but good reports. Worst thing I've seen said is the audio bass was a bit underwhelming!

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.

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...

> 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.

Sorry, I'd completely missed that you wrote "notebook"!

XPS should be "developer laptops". They even come with Linux. So I tried two.

Never experienced a more faulty keyboard on a computer in my life. Hanging keys, firmware updates that never really fixed the problem, support forums full of same questions. I'll never buy one again.

Too bad as I wanted to support "big brand w/ Linux preinstalled".

“ I wanted to support "big brand w/ Linux preinstalled"”

Look at Lenovo maybe :)

Got one from them now. But not a Linux pre-installed model, sadly.

Even a total Linux noob like myself (never touched it in my life) that installed his last OS like over a decade ago got Ubuntu on a X1E Gen 2 in around 30 minutes. No issues, Windows stays for the odd things that don't work under Linux (some Steam games, mostly...).

I'm running linux for a while now (20y+). I got it to work well on the Yoga7 Slim, but it required some tweaking (which I dont mind).

X and T lines seem to do better with linux out of the box.

On the other hand, I have a XPS 15 9500 I use with Linux all day and never had an issue with anything. Always suspends, never wakes up by itself, no hardware issues... My work 16" MBP on the other hand killed the battery after one week in "suspend" when I was on vacation, probably due to the Power Nap functionality, which sounds pretty much like the Modern Standby being talked on.

Just heads up: Danish cities can't buy Lenovo laptops, at least certain models, because Lenovo can't guarantee that they are not made using Uyghur slave labour.

So if that's important to you, maybe don't buy Lenovo.

Wow. Gotta give it to the Danish.

> can't guarantee that they are not made using Uyghur slave labour.

That's big corp speak for admitting they do, right?

Hanging keys... I had that issue when I bought my last XPS secondhand. A tech came out and replaced the keyboard, and that was that.

Imagine if we had the technology to, when a laptop was in a hibernated or off state to use some sort of a mechanism to physically disconnect the battery. I know this is absolutely crazy but it seems to me that this would solve these problems in a foolproof way that wouldn't lead to the situation where your mission critical piece of equipment has killed it's battery, or itself entirely because it decided to do something you didn't want. Imagine a physical device capable of making and unmaking an electrical connection based on the angle or position of a physical component that is then unable to be superseded by bad programming. Imagine.

I think this is a good idea. Like a physical disconnect for camera and mics. At some level, I just don’t trust software, especially nothing as complex as an OS, to do the right thing 100% of the time.

Although frankly I’ve never had issues like this with a Mac. I’ve never taken a mac out of a bag and had the battery dead or laptop hot.

10-14 years ago my Dell laptops had removable battery. I did not use it to ensure anything (hibernation worked perfectly for me these days), but I would carry with me a spare fully-charged battery. Two batteries usually were enough for a cross-Atlantic trip, which was a frequent feature of my life.

Perhaps a device with a movable metal plate that disconnects a wire.. we could call it an 'Off Switch'

According to archive.org[0], looks like just now has Dell removed the red highlighted part that mentions the warranty. When I looked at the page earlier today, it was still there.

``` 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. ```

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210624044948/https://www.dell....

Years ago (~2010) I learned that companies sell laptops which can't cool themselves properly. I had an Acer "gaming laptop," which from the factory had fans which didn't sufficiently cool the CPU. After about 2 years of normal use, it cooked its thermal paste, and would shut off under even moderate use / stress.

This is obviously a different situation than what's occurring with Dell laptops, but it's not too far afield. When I bought the Acer, I never even considered reading up on cooling. I figured I'd only have to understand cooling if I built a computer myself: surely one from a manufacturer would already be able to cool itself sufficiently. Well, it turned out I was wrong. Keeping laptops cool is actually a pretty tough engineering problem, and too many companies and consumers aren't will to pay the price (either in higher dollar amount, or constrained capabilities) to ensure that this a standard.

Doesn't seem to be much better for desktops: my wife just bought a Dell PC for gaming, and we have to replace the cpu cooler and case fan because what was supplied was clearly inadequate. Just because Dell wanted to shave a couple bucks off the manufacturing cost.

Reminds me of the issue I remember with old Dell gaming laptops where the cups just had an insane amount of thermal paste on them so they always ran way hotter than they should.

You really can't trust the manufacturer to know what they're doing, especially if the potential problem is unlikely to be covered under warranty.

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?

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.

Windows wakes up the computer all the fucking time, and this is the reason why they don't take responsibility. Frankly it's not just dangerous, as noted in the faq, but very creepy as well: it feels like someone tampered with it, because it's not in the state you left it in. I wish they weren't so successful with all their bullshit.

It happened fairly regularly that in the middle of the night I'd hear the windows notification chime, because my wife's desktop decided to wake up and do things.

I've had hibernated laptops wake up for whatever reasons in bags before. They get super-hot and shut down.

Come to think of it, they were Dells. Perhaps some switch is not properly debounced or something.

The Surface Pro 4 had that problem for months after its release. https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/4hnhuz/just_took_m...

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.

I don't run Windows. I believe I was running Ubuntu at the time this was a problem, possibly Debian. This was a few years back.

Had similar issues. Has something to do with wake timers (see powercfg /waketimers)

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).

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.

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.

It was frustrating how my Dell XPS Laptop would frequently wake up in the laptop bag. When I open the bag, the laptop was near smoking hot. I fixed it by disabling Modern Standby but a Microsoft update killed that registry hack and I was forced to fully shut down the laptop.

Then my work Dell Precision 5530 started doing the same thing and I'm forced to shut it down. The problem was that particular laptop took several minutes to boot due to a slow BIOS post and corporate bloatware.

I always feel like laptops have actually started to degrade in the last decade. Maybe it's consumerism, but fairly often I get the idea they just assume after two or three years their products will fail.

I can personally vouch for Acer though, while I haven't purchased one of their laptops recently, when I was younger I had one I just abused the hell out of and it still worked fine.

It's very fun to make your stuff last longer

This is humorous timing for me. I just purchased an XPS 9510 and sleep mode was busted out of the box. After multiple hours of troubleshooting and updating bios and firmware with their "premium" support team, the machine still didn't work. I returned the laptop and vowed to never purchase a dell product ever again. They seem to have serious quality control issues in their product pipelines.

This is more of a Windows problem than a Dell problem. Windows seems to be terrible at going to sleep and staying asleep.

My current and previous Windows laptops (neither were from Dell) are/were set to sleep for 15 minutes and then hibernate when I have the lid closed, because otherwise they would randomly wake up, deplete the battery, generate lots of heat, and sometimes wake me up in the middle of the night.

I've also had desktop PCs with Windows that just refused to go to / stay asleep for various reasons including windows updates (that still hadn't completed a week later) and a documentation website that had a small silent video on loop (like an animated gif.)

My 2019 MacBook is better about this; once it goes to sleep, it seems to stay asleep. But it's still not perfect - I hit an issue where the iOS simulator and/or the Android emulator caused it to stay awake with the lid shut and drain my battery. So now I do kill those before closing the lid. But it does feel safe to put in a bag once it's actually asleep.

Dell used to have the option to disable "modern sleep" which is the root cause of all these problems. Dell in a later firmware update disabled the ability for end users to "fix" the problem on their end. This was about three years ago for the 9570 XPS model, they have not reverted this user-hostile action to my knowledge.

I still have my 9570 for gaming, just because I don't have the time to focus on replacing my windows laptop, but that's certainly the Last dell I plan on buying, I deal with laptop users regularly and this is one of the most common dell-specific complaints I hear/see.

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.

Putting your Laptop in a Back in sleep mode is a normal common usage for a laptop.

Hence I'm pretty sure that at least in Germany voiding warranty because of it is not legal.

I find this feature(tm) infuriating. It's one of the first things I disable when I format the laptop.

The battery drain for me much more significant, on the order of 30% per day. Oftentimes I would open my laptop after a day or two and it would be at a critical level if not outright dead.

I kept forgetting exactly how to fix it, since finding the right sites online required quite the exact combination of black magic keywords (since it's much easier to find articles sleep vs hibernation). Until today, actually, I had not been aware of the term "modern suspend".

I use Linux, so here's how to disable modern suspend: https://devnull.land/laptop-s2idle-to-deep

I have a dell 9700 and I had this happen just yesterday on a god damn flight. I am still pissed. I never put my laptop to sleep/hibernate. I always shutdown. I have no idea but it somehow turned on in my bag, I felt it on my leg on the flight. I opened the bag and it was freaking hot. I have no idea how this happened. I noticed sometimes when I docked I click shutdown, it doesn't shutdown.

The other thing is there is no freaking light on the laptop other than the keyboard lighting to indicate it's off. I have to flip the laptop and listen to see if it's on, I look like a crazy person in public. I love the laptop but this is downright ridiculous. As I am typing on it, I smell an electronic burn but the laptop seems fine.

I worked as a consultant for a while, and we needed light fast laptops. My boss once told me that he would blanket his laptop in order to have it fail so he could request a new model. Dell voiding warranties for someone who would do that is perfectly understandable.

I have had some sort of problem with battery discharging on my MBP after shutting down fully from Windows. I can't use sleep/hibernate on Windows at all because it crashes upon restarting, with a kernel panic that is reported to Apple next time I start MacOS. That seems to have to do with initiating the Touch Bar. Things are fine when sleeping or shutting down from MacOS, but three times now I have shutdown from Windows and disconnected from power, then the battery is almost fully discharged (1-2%) when I turn on the computer less than 24 hours later. I don't understand what might be happening while it is fully shutdown.

I really wonder what still drives people to Dell? Their products looks marvelous on the tech sheet, and that's also where the marvel ends. In my current career I've yet to touch a Dell laptop that doesn't try to melt itself by simply turning on, or fails to respond to touching the power button. It's as if the operation of the Power Button is a schrodinger cat.

Any corporation that is operating exclusively on Dell I deem to regard as a cost mitigation corporation that does not have their developers at their first place. I believe that no sane developer will opt for Dell's products, but rather go with Lenovo or Apple.

I've had several Dell devices, both laptops and desktops, both at home and at work, and that has never been my experience. In fact, I'm typing this on a Dell laptop, which doesn't have any of these issues you mentioned.

> I believe that no sane developer will opt for Dell's products, but rather go with Lenovo or Apple.

I'm not interested in Apple devices, since besides being very expensive, I prefer to use Linux exclusively, and as far as I know, Linux on Apple devices tends to be problematic.

As for Lenovo, I tried buying a Lenovo device once, but they canceled the sale without any explanation and without giving my money back; and I simply couldn't contact their sales department to ask for a refund (by phone they said it had to be done through email, but the emails went unanswered; I had to sue them in small claims to get my money back). Contrast that with my experience with Dell, where even when their service wasn't at its best (IIRC, some sort of logistics issue due to changing their carrier), they at least answered my phone calls.

but rather go with Lenovo

I went Lenovo, and it was not an improvement over my previous Dell. It wakes up and kills the battery when the lid is closed all the time. And at essentially the same spec I get less than half the battery and twice the fan noise compare to the Dell.

Dell XPS is marvelous. Keep it with hands and type on is so pleasureful. It is not superior in tech sense, but it is so cute.

Given concrete problem, looks like it is for all new notebooks and/or OS: I have same issue with HP ProBook 640G8 + Linux.

They wish warranty worked like this in most countries.

Modern laptops are fucking infuriating this way. I always go over my sleep and shutdown settings, trying to make things as "off" as possible yet they never seem to quite get there. Devices that are supposed to be turned off die overnight. Devices that are supposed to be off still show as connected to the wifi router. It makes you have zero faith in your computer when you do everything you can to turn it off and it still loses most of its charge after a day in your bag.

Am I the only one who is afraid that part of the reason for not fixing behaviour like this might be a nudging towards "always on" devices?

Reading through the comments it seems on Windows this might be related to WLAN and automatic updates, a rather sensitive area when it comes to security and privacy.

Happy to hear your opinions, I'd really love to be proven 100% wrong about this.

Occam's Razor suggests that it is likely promoted to boost UX. Being able to open a laptop and get going instantly (much like unlocking a phone or tablet) appeals to end users.

Personally, I couldn't give a darn. I grew up staring at a Windows 3.11 boot screen for minutes at a time. I have patience LOL

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.

I haven't had ONE problem of this kind with ThinkPad

My P series ThinkPad does this all the time.

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 laptop will overheat as a result of that action.

IOW, all modern Dell laptops are defective by design. Crazy that they can ship something this broken and stay in business...

2020 XPS 9310 user here. Running Linux on the Windows edition of this laptop, with the killer wifi ath11k QCA6390. Bios 3.0.4.

Wifi: I’m now on Linux 5.14.3 and have been chasing latest kernels all year for stable QCA6390 support - this is now all good for this edition of the laptop.

Sleep: Running hot in sleep, would always be flat in the morning etc.

As others have pointed out, there are infrequent issues where rewakening doesn’t completely - blank screen, necessitating hard power off.

However sleep/resume are much better - to the point of acceptable - after switching to AHCI disk setup in the bios.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211879#c24

Switching bios disk from RAID to AHCI allows the machine to reach C10. The creates the issue Windows 10 (Pro) no longer sees the boot drive, so you have to set it back to RAID mode if needed.

It's funny to read this after just arriving home with my XPS 15 9500 suspended in my backpack. I got it last week and installed Manjaro right away, and everything worked very well out of the box.

The fans keep going on full throttle even with a relatively idle desktop. The cores were constantly reaching 100°C while initializing a heavy dev environment.

The laptop's physical design is attractive, but abysmal. The main ventilation hole is located under the hinges, facing behind the laptop. Opening the lid will completely block this airway with a vertical wall 4 mm away. The venting grill at the bottom is lifted only a millimeter away from the table. Lifting the laptop off the table makes the fans sound way louder while lowering down in pitch - I think this is a clear sign of restricted airflow.

You really shouldn't pack this much beefy hardware in a package almost as flat as a damn biscuit.

FWIW, Dell replaced my mainboard on site and in a timely way, and without asking any stupid questions, especially not about whether it had been in a bag or the like...

Once I convinced them that no, their crappy machine is not broken because I'm running Linux on it.

I made the mistake of buying a 7390 2in1 just before the pandemic and got stuck with it. It's my favourite personal soapbox ever since. Needless to say, I won't be buying Dell again either...

Edit: there, a lengthy rant about this piece of crap and how misguided it is to give it the near-same model number as their linux flagship: https://ssb.muchmuch.coffee/%25xCjWwwuseVVLq%2F4FYbf1KUc5vHz...

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

    #!/bin/bash
    (cat /proc/acpi/wakeup | grep "GLAN" | grep "enabled") && echo "GLAN" > /proc/acpi/wakeup 
    (cat /proc/acpi/wakeup | grep "XHC" | grep "enabled") && echo "XHC" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Hardly relevant to the topic at hand, but I'd simplify this to

  grep 'GLAN.*enabled' /proc/acpi/wakeup && echo GLAN >/proc/acpi/wakeup
  grep 'XHC.*enabled' /proc/acpi/wakeup && echo XHC >/proc/acpi/wakeup

In all extended travel and especially airplane travel, safety should be your primary concern. 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 laptop will overheat as a result of that action.

With regards to transporting your laptop, safety should be your primary concern. You should always turn the laptop OFF: Select the Start button ,Click Power, Click Shut down

Wow, I'd be asking for a refund, since that would make my laptop much less usable -- when I leave work, I fold up my laptop, put it in my bag, then hop on the bus home, then when I get home, I opened it up and pick up where I left off, then repeat in the morning.

XPS (And the precision equivalents) overheat even outside bags, if you just leave them on long enough. I have had 2 in a row now that don't work properly after being powered on for a few months. The battery must be LiPo or something (Which would be a completely terrible idea in a laptop because it changes size with charge).

Just build the damn things to work when plugged in for long periods of time. I'm not going to power it down every week or even every month. I just want it to run quiet and cool, and I'd be happy for it to be twice as thick and have half the battery if that what's needed.

Or why not just make it work without the battery so I can keep the battery on a shelf until one of the few days per year I need it?

I installed linux to fix this problem (it did, at the cost of the camera, which stopped working.)

Under linux, tho, I've watched my battery max-charge decline 32% in about eighteen months.

My theory is that the XPS uses some sort Windows-integrated software to determine when the charge in the battery is critically (=battery-damagingly) low. If there's a firmware or hardware failsafe, it's too generous.

Linux lacks this integration, so the laptop chews up its battery instead of going into suspend.

My old Linux-running ThinkPad did not do this, IIRC. If I fell asleep with it beside me in bed, it would eventually power down at about 3% charge. Not great, not terrible.

Yeah, eyeing the Framework here also.

So, don't use the sleep mode for what it's for on your $1500 machine?

My 9500 is more like $4000. And it can't sleep properly.

I had a 13" XPS max specced which when sleeping suddendly sounded the alarm when the fan did not work. The sound was the same decibel as our smoke detector - in the middle of the night next to the bed.

Macs are the only computers I’ve used that have had close to zero issues with sleep. But I don’t even bother sleeping on the machines running Linux distros: with SSDs, powering on and off is so fast that I just shut the computer down whenever I’m done with it. I should time it to know for sure, but a cold boot to fully operational Firefox window feels like maybe 15 seconds. Powering off is not even five seconds. Not as fast as waking from sleep on my MBP but zippy enough for me.

That almost happened to me on an Asus, Windows waked it. I put it to sleep, put it in my backpack, left work, some hours later it was incredibly hot, lucky I saw it in time. After that I started to use hibernate when leaving work.

But at home I would still notice the laptop on by itself in the morning, or the fan starting at 2am, at some point I was just furious, that the PC would not respect my settings. I disabled wake timers, updates, schedule tasks...

Now I keep all my Windows inside boxes ...virtual boxes

I did this accidentally with an old Latitude in a backpack, and either the laptop woke up or the fan kept blowing while Windows was asleep, and when I opened the bag it was HOT!! Freaked me out, thankfully no damage to anything, but this may have caused the hard drive issues I had if the drive was working while in transit.

These reasons are why I use hibernate or shutdown before transit, and I have my lid settings to hibernate upon closed (plugged in or battery), just to be safe.

Linux -> Suspend -> S3 You just need ensure that the laptop successfully suspended and it never made a problem with mit ThinkPads.

Like others pointed out, the problem for Dell seems caused by the awkward additional standbys introduced by Microsoft "Modern Standby" and so on. We still miss some similar power target to what phones use. Probably 'systemctl suspend' should mean hard S3 and LID-Close something like phones behavior.

Dell could solve this. Seems easy enough to notice that the laptop is closed, sleeping, and overheating. At that point the firmware could do something about it.

I don't miss having to worry about this type of nonsense. Is it a Dell problem? Is it Microsoft problem? Don't care - I just need my laptop to work.

I've had every Microsoft laptop I can think of. Dell, Lenovo, Acer etc...

In 2014 I switched to Apple Macbook Air and have remained Apple ever since despite the fact that I run a .NET tech stack product company.

Yes the Macbook pro keyboard debacle was a shit show but otherwise my Macs "just work".

I can't believe Dell and/or Microsoft have fucked up laptop design so badly that you can't keep a sleeping laptop in your bag. It has to be intentional. They are trying to lose users. Anybody with a functioning brain will realize that this is a massive regression and cannot be allowed to be released in the wild. Imagine paying $2500 for a Dell XPS and not being able to keep it on sleep!

I’ve found that dell laptops don’t sleep when unplugged from a dock in clamshell mode with an external monitor.

It was pleasant to find when I’d left work to the airport after unplugging it and stuffing it my bag, that the closed computer was burning up and at critical battery.

Now MS/dell Claims that’s a feature not a bug and that they’ve expanded the situations where that occurs. What are they smoking? Oh yeah burning laptop fumes

Did they change the meaning of "hibernate"? Showing it in the "power" menu has also been disabled, though you can assign it to the power button and then press the button.

I have a Dell laptop that I thought was hibernated. Closed lid usually sets it to hibernate.

Well that didn't work this one time and the laptop was left on in my backpack... Well something fried and now my laptop would not recognize the dell charger and tell me to plug it into a genuine Dell charger half the time and would not charge. It was a 2017 model so when this happened last year I bought a Lenovo.

I have an Inspiron that differs from the same issue. Worse is that it has an Nvidia Quadro that overheats the moment I put it on a flat surface.

The fan is loud, and it just won't go to sleep, so I end up always shutting down.

I rarely use it, and instead brought my own laptop to work. It's a shame because the Dell that I used at a previous employer also suffered from thermal and noise issues.

'How to ruin the user experience' training in master level!

There is some marginally/sometimes/circumstantially useful fetur.... no, not feature... thing, that requires extensive attention to avoid permanent damage to your precious data and other properties. Gives some wee bit convenience but cause lots of inconvenience and the prospect of serious damage.

Way to go Dell! : /

A PC in sleep/hibernate/standby mode is not OFF. It's in a (very) low power mode.

Hibernate is off. You can pull the battery and put it back just fine.

Both my work and private laptop can (but not always do) behave like that. Additionally, depending on the version of vendor bloatware, they may not wake up without a hard reset and just keep doing... something in the background. I think it has something to do with the lockscreen.

Windows is Windows is Windows I guess.

My private laptop boots in under 30s, so I stopped paying any mind to this.

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.

I have a 9310, it took some time to realize the laptop was not sleeping because it has no indicators. After some digging I realized the culprit was sensors which woke the system immediately after any slight movement. I'm now removing intel_hid module automatically before sleeping, no more issues since. But I must admit, this fault is moronic.

Basically the Dell XPS laptop SO BADLY DESIGNED it can not handle the excess heat of being put into a standard, used-by-everyone laptop bag!!

I would assume they just laid out the standard "Example Design" without any thermal design analysis that NORML ENGINEERING companies do with any of the latest deep nanometer parts.

The thing is: if you do NOT using good power supply or thermal design, the CPUs, RAM, Flash, etc. will only have an operating lifetime on the short end of the current 5-10 years usable life for these parts. If you overheat them, they will attain <5 year lifespan. If you do good thermal design, you'll get closer to 10 years. If you use a schlock power supply to charge the battery and use the battery power, you will attain <5 year lifespan. If you design an ultra-low-ripple power supply and use quality battery power chips, you will get closer to 10 years.

We are now at device physics lifespans that are so close to economic lifespans that now this kind of design MATTERS ENTIRELY. If you cut corners, you will quickly destroy your brand value because you will not be able to exceed economic lifespan expectations with your physical/physics-defined lifespan realities.

The standard business-as-usual will fail now because things have changed now.

I had to bust out the PowerShell console on my windows machine to manipulate its wake sources to block it from waking on LAN since something would wake it within 10 minutes after sleep every time.

I can't imagine how infuriating that would be if it were a laptop and that behavior was running down the battery and heating it up.

It's remarkable to me how generally pleasant the phone/tablet power management experience is, in comparison to laptops. It's such complete shit on laptops. My laptop has better battery life in S0 low power idle than either S3 or (Linux) S2idle. I blame ACPI as a standard, and all of its bearers.

This is why people use Apple laptops. I’d be fine using Linux as my OS. But my employer issues my laptop and chooses the model. If serious non-Apple laptop manufacturers are still making crap like this, how do I know my employer won’t choose hardware as bad as this for their Windows and Linux employees?

I agree, you're going to get downvoted but it's just true. This _is_ why people use MacBooks. It just isn't the same experience in other cases, especially now with the extreme quietness and performance of M1, but even before the standby behaviour was extremely reliable.

https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mh40773/mac

Mac sleep isn't sleep either, and yes, some macs have issues returning to sleep after

You can turn power nap off, and "some macs have issues" is _very_ different from Dell saying "if you put it in your bag on standby it voids your warranty".

Dell puts it in writing, Apple puts their fingers in their ears (butterfly keyboards, "you're holding it wrong").

So your justification for Dell voiding warranty upon putting the laptop in the bag on standby is that reads notes Apple...does not void the warranty, and that it is somehow virtuous to explicitly void warranty instead of honouring warranty? Sorry, but your logic is completely insane.

I'm not justifying Dell here, I'm just replying to the comment that you can somehow avoid these issues with Apple.

I have had experience with my last personally owned Apple products fighting them to honour the warranty. Maybe they're better in the US, but it's not evident to me that that's something you can rely on: https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple-admits-faulty-macbook-...

I agree with the idea that Dell should still be made honour the warranty, via court proceedings if they hold out too long, just as has occasionally been needed of Apple in the past.

OSX does standard ACPI S3 for Intel Macs, it is "real" sleep. If you turn on darkwake (Power Nap) it does as advertised and wakes up to do background tasks. It isn't the same as Windows, UEFI, and the S0I3 state. The OSX ACPI doesn't even implement it.

I’m not a Windows user anymore but could this potentially help? I came across it on my Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/dragosr/status/1441894003822120960?s=21

Had this issue with my XPS 9570. I also had the heatsink issue that is well documented by now, and upon opening it found further significant manufacturing defects that Dell refused to acknowledge.

Never buying a Dell again. It's a pity because they appear solid and well-made from appearances and specs.

As an owner of XPS 15 9560, I can tell you that the XPS line is a gift that keeps giving. 6 generations of XPS laptops since 2021 and they barely fixed most of the overheating issues in that time period, while charging premium prices for each barely-functioning product along the way.

My first XPS had a fun little design quirk where the laptop display itself obstructed the (single and only) exhaust vent.

Out of the factory, the airflow was acceptable, but after a year of use and dust buildup, guess what... the laptop would overheat!

Double whammy -- the air that _could_ get through was so hot that it would also deform the part of the screen that obstructed the vent.

I don't use Windows but this still happened to me with my XPS 15 2020.

I put it in sleep and shoved it in a bag while going on a hike. Fortunately it was only an hour hike and I could literally feel the heat emanating from the machine through the fabric of the bag. Don't do it.

Can't the laptop just turn off or hibernate when it gets too hot in a bag or sleeve (or both)?

I have a Dell 9570,three years old, and the problem is infuriating. I forgot about this and got home just last week to find my laptop was about a million degrees.

This is my third XPS laptop - my first two were two of the best computers I've ever owned.

This one has put me off Dell completely.

Similar issues for me on Precision 5520 (stock Ubuntu). Laptop nearly fried itself in my backpack from overheating—-can’t reason causally for sure but seems like it destroyed a chip involved with power regulation and damaged some liquid crystals in the display.

So has anyone's bag actually caught fire due to this?

If so, can we put it in a Dell commercial? Just grab any old Dell advertisement stock footage and dub it with fire alarm noises and a spouse yelling in the distance "honey, your room caught fire again!"

I had a backpack melt because of this. There is a hole through and through, about the size of a half dollar.

Can I bribe you for a photo of it? That’s amazing.

Sure, Ill charge my camera now and post after lunch. Looking at that backpack now, I'm noticing the hole is far larger than a half dollar. It's about 6 inches.

Surely this sort of stuff won’t happen on an Apple Silicon machine.

It really does look like the competition has a lot of catching up to do. But probably after the M1X / M2 Macbook announcements, the competitors will be set back another 2 years behind Apple again.

MacBooks have similar functionality ("Power Nap"), which allows for some telemetry (updating your iCloud calendar/drive/mail, MDM telemetry for corporate-owned devices, etc) while asleep. It hasn't been an issue though.

This is not good. In the before-times, closing the lid, throwing my laptop in my bag, and commuting happened twice daily. I suppose that I'm extra glad I chose a Mac with my current employer - even if I don't commute daily anymore.

and I have a dell bag that came with the laptop...

Pre-Covid, I did daily run commuting with a couple different models of XPS 13 with Ubuntu installed and suspended and didn't have a problem.

I always used S3 suspend and never hiberation because I quit trusting and trying hiberation on Linux long ago.

"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 laptop will overheat as a result of that action."

And here I just thought it was a crappy BIOS...many is the time I've undocked, thrown it in the messenger bag, then pulled it out at another location only to have it roasting with the fan on full.

So, sleep isn't sleep apparently

I had this issue when using Windows but not on Linux. Sleep worked fine on Linux.

Not on brand new Intel laptops. They've now removed s3 sleep hardware support.

This is why my XPS13 laptop's battery is swollen. It was extremely hot many times I pulled it out of the bag.

And because of the battery swell, I cannot use the trackpad clicks anymore. Dell should recall and help customers.

This happened to me several times with my 2017 XPS, and as well to my business partner with the same laptop.

It would get so hot that you could barely touch it to pull it out. I'm amazed there were no fires from this.

I have a very recent Dell laptop that has terrible standby performance on Linux (as in the battery fully drains in 8-12 hours on standby). Could this be related or is it a Windows only issue?

My Microsoft desktop restarts itself overnight to install updates no matter what registry settings I change.

I’ve lost a lot of work this way.

Later this year, I will buy the 2021 Macbook, and put Linux on the desktop. I can’t wait!

And this is why I got a passively cooled laptop without a fan. It's very weak, but it's worth it to not have any anxiety about it overheating in my bag. Absolutely fantastic for college.

Why would it ever break?

Countless times I've had my laptops fail to suspend due to kernel bugs (heh), fall into a spin loop (e.g. in a kernel panic) and get quite hot in my backpack. Nothing broke.

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.

I own a Dell xps laptop. I will never buy anything from dell again if there's anything remotely competitive.

Nice to see in this thread that it's not just bad luck. It's Dell all the way.

I learnt quickly that my circa 2016 MacBook Pro 15” would do this too. Sometimes when I got it out of my satchel, most of the battery had been drained and it was far too hot to use.

This fried my laptop and I assumed it was the stupid machines fault, I can't believe I'm just now learning windows itself is to blame. How is this bug even possible?

The whole idea of sleep is so we can put it in a bag, walk somewhere else, take it out and continue working.

If this doesn't work on a mainstream product it is defective in my opinion.

I started disabling Sleep/Hibernate on all my machines a decade ago. Everything just worked better without it. Sad to see they still haven't sorted it out.

This was the primary reason I switched to Apple about 10 years ago. I just wanted a laptop I could reliably shut and open and have it act like I expect it to.

Dell service quality is getting down.

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 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.

Well, that explains: I have a XPS 13 since jan. 2019 and last year I had to replace the battery. It bulged, pushing the keyboard up a bit. Luckily no fire

Which brand did you use? Can you share the link? I have the same issue.

I thought hibernate was supposed to be the mode when memory is dumped to the persistent storage and the device is turned off? That definition changed?

I wish it could be REALLY clear when a laptop is off. What happens when I shut the lid? I don't know, I can't see the power button anymore.

You’d think companies could at least keep things the same instead of making it actively worse. Laptops sleeping is largely a solved problem

The power management of dell XPS 17 is absolutely awful. Sometimes it hibernates. Sometimes it doesn`t. I have tried absolutely everything.

Improper storage is a perfectly reasonable reason to void a warranty. This is accidental damage, and Dell sells a separate plan for that.

Is the S4 still supported in Windows 10? And how do you go about finding out if S3 or S4 are supported in a laptop you may want to buy?

This is why the M1 iPad would be amazing as an open hardware platform… my 10 year old iPad loses a couple percent a day while asleep.

It seems likely to me that’s true because it is not an open platform.

Yet another reason to dislike Microsoft Windows.

https://archive.is/lMvTa

Odd, how installing linux solves the issue... (speaking from personal experience with 3 different XPSs)

I've had an XPS running Linux for 8 years. Never was an issue. The problem definitely is Windows...

All I hear is "don't buy XPS laptop we lost the know-how to build them properly"

This has been a problem with Dell laptops since as long as I've been using them (2002).

Same with my Dell Precision... I have to do a full shutdown before putting it in my bag.

My home-built PC will never stay asleep, so I have to shut it off. I don't get it.

I bought an Alienware laptop in 2010. I booted it up in the shop, then packed it up thinking I've shut it down. After I got home I found out that it went to sleep in the middle of setting up process.

I used it at varying capacities all the way until last year when I lost it in an apartment fire.

Sounds more like "Do not leave a laptop running Windows in a bag"?

"...if you leave it turned ON".

Just putting it in a bag does not void the warranty.

So, it isn't a problem if you just use Linux on your Dell XPS, right?

Dell has always been a mid-to-trash brand but this is hilariously awful

What are the good alternatives for an XPS like laptop that runs Linux?

Thinkpads

Had this same problem with another laptop brand too. It was scary.

Never had any issue like that with a zbook on Linux.

This is misleading. Simply putting the laptop is a bag won't void its warranty. OTOH, putting in the laptop bag while it's on and letting it cook will.

Not misleading at all. Their sleep is BROKEN compared to what people's expectation of SLEEP are.

What the actual fuck. That's insane.

Do not taunt the happy fun laptop.

Learned the hard way in 2003.

Do they sell you bags?

RIP laptops.

certainly this isn't news.

Does anyone even use hibernate in 2021...? Every windows/linux machine I've tried using it on just results in a terrible experience. Generally my system just hangs or takes 10+ minutes to save to disk or restore (despite having a modern workstation with 32GB+ of RAM and a nearly empty high end NVMe SSD).

It's been the first thing I've disabled for years, power management is decent enough that a desktop system will draw a marginal amount of power at idle even if you don't use suspend or hibernate.

Of course, on my macbook it 'just works' and I've left everything default in terms of power management, I assume it does something similar to hibernate/S3 sleep but it always comes back instantly and without draining the battery while closed. I carry it in a backpack commonly and have never had issues with it being hot when I take it out.

On desktops I've never had a problem with hibernate either with windows or Linux.

On HDD it takes time, but no longer than booting from cold.

On SSD it's less than ten seconds to hibernate or boot.

I've had to tweak wake on lan and disable mouse waking pc etc but that's not different for sleep

Laptops however are a nightmare and just don't or won't hibernate properly

What the hell is going on with US software companies? Torching people's machines just to collect a little more data makes no sense!

Buy a Tuxedo Computer!

I have a XPS with Linux, closing the lid does almost nothing but turn the screenlock on.

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.

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.

MacBook folks: we’re in 2021. These laptops turn on and off very quickly. Forget about sleep, hibernation etc. Just shut it down.

Semi-related:

"The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28606962

Probably a better option for many people's next purchase (when they add Ryzen models anyway! ;>)

I don't see how this is related other than it also being a laptop.

Clickbait.

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.

No it's not clickbait.

Weird that you're angrier about a headline than a warranty being voided by putting a laptop in a bag.

So, why does the lid close then?

Or in other words, from the perspective of the hardware, what is about to happen once somebody closes the lid?

Absolutely fair, from Dell's POV.

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.

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