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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

(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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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;

>>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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

funny

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

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

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.

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...

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

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!

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.

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

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’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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

but very easily fixed as written above :)

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Were you binge watching "Halt and Catch Fire"?

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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'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'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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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 ^^

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

The lack of respect for users is really shocking lately.

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!

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.

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.

It's "for our security," dontchaknow.

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...

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 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).

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.

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’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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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)

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