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Comment by AndrewDavis | Hacker News Reader

> Usually this is because of the Modern Standby/S0 crap and in many cases there isn't a solution because the BIOS removed support for S3.

Also, modern windows won't let you select S3 sleep if it detects support for S0. There used to be a simple registry edits you could do but Microsoft seem to have closed that loophole.

I chose my current laptop because in the BIOS it has a sleep setting, and if you pick the oddly named "Linux sleep" it disables S0 sleep. Thereby allowing S3 sleep in Windows.

This is after having a previous laptop act like a heater to my lunch in my bag, or being dead despite being full charged after waking up overnight and running hard till the battery ran out. Or perhaps the most obnoxious, my wife closing her laptop with a video running and at 3am her laptop bringing itself to life waking us up.

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> There used to be a simple registry edits you could do but Microsoft seem to have closed that loophole.

Why? I mean, what incentive does MS have to say "people are still trying to use the non-buggy sleep that doesn't cause fires, let's close the loophole to force using the buggy sleep"?

The non-buggy sleep (S3) isn't even supported in the BIOS in many new laptops now (in the Dell I'm using for example). So MS probably decided to kill that option off for everyone. To be honest it's a very confusing situation since there are so many hardware configurations under Windows and if you search online I think some people are still able to disable S0 on their new laptop/latest Windows, but some (myself) definitely cannot.

> So MS probably decided to kill that option off for everyone.

not so, because of.

Probably because "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."

Quote from, and more info about Modern Standby, here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

S3 is considered “legacy”: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

The main motivation for Modern Standby was to enable instant wakeup and push notification-like functionality during standby, like smartphones. That’s not possible with the traditional sleep modes. Unfortunately it doesn’t work as seamlessly as one would like.

What if I don't want push notifications and want laptop closed to mean to not do anything? Does this new mode still support that, or is the notifications and heat-up-in-your-backpack thing there on purpose and not disablable? In other words, is this new thing forcing this new behavior only, or does it also support the same things as S3 if you choose to want that?

Note that I use Linux and a less-than-a-year-old thinkpad that has traditional standby, but I'd like to know what the inevitable that's coming is

I’ve had ongoing problems with my new laptop either not sleeping properly or waking up randomly in my backpack and toasting itself until it shuts down with a critical overtemp error. My solution is to set the power button to hibernate, and just press the power button if I expect it to be in my bag for more than 15 minutes.

The most annoying crap with modern sleep is that it doesn't lock the computer, only after some time has elapsed in sleep. I want the computer be locked immediately. Also Keepass cannot hook the sleep event, and lock the database. This is a security nightmare for me, really inconvenient.

Other is that the slightest mouse movement wakes the computer. Disabling wake devices does not work anymore. Guides say disable it in your bios. If there is a configuration option... I don't have (neither on a Lenovo, nor on a Beelink) such option. (Yes, I did the powercfg -wake-armed/device manager rain-dance, to no avail, it worked reliably to configure wake sources on S3)

S3 sleep was good enough for me, and S0 is a large step back in reliability and usability, for no perceived benefit. Unfortunately my newer machine does not support S3 anymore.

With MS copying all the bad ideas from MacOS it is getting ever worse, slowly Windows (being my get stuff done desktop) becoming as unusable my Mac. (ps. I'm was a long time, 10+ years, Linux desktop user, but constant flux of the platform made me move away)

The Macs (at least the Apple Silicon ones) do it much better, though. In most cases I can see minimal battery loss even over days. Whereas the Windows laptops are good for maybe a few hours on sleep. Whatever Apple is doing is miles apart from Windows/PC in terms of implementation even if they are theoretically the same.

However, the "trick" to disabling mouse wake-up for me has been to go into Device Manager and disallow the individual mouse from waking the machine up. It's annoying because I'd still like to have it wake up on button press but it extends the battery significantly. Even on desktop, it's useful to keep the system asleep and not spinning up the hard drive and waking the monitor pointlessly in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately having disabled all devices as wake sources does not help in my case (actually a HP and a Dell machine are also affected in the household). It doesn't matter if I click through the device manager or the powercfg (they are equivalent). S0 is disappointing for me so far.

My Mac (M1 Air) does this a bit better indeed, but I hear colleagues also cursing it for heating up in the backpack, and such (M2 CPU). Still I think most of the copied stuff made windows worse (lots of UI/UX stepbacks also).

I use Hibernation instead of Standby. I have an SSD so the difference boils down to maybe 10 seconds. Which is time I do have :)

Hybrid standby is the best, but requires S3 support.

Hibernate is great, except for the part where it wears down your SSD much faster, especially if you have a machine with big amount of RAM.

The impact is minor. SSDs are super durable nowadays and Hibernating for years won't really make a difference. The SSDs will outlive the need for a bigger disk anyway. But technically I agree.

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