The gist:

The always-on nature of phones and tablets is incredibly convenient. Wouldn’t it be great if your (non-ARM) laptop or desktop could do this too? Save power when you’re not using it, but still be ready at a moment’s notice?

Microsoft certainly thought so, which is why when Windows 8 was released, it introduced a new feature called Connected Standby. If the hardware indicated support (foreshadowing), instead of telling the BIOS to enter system standby, Windows would enter Connected Standby.

I first ran into the wonders of Modern Standby on my Dell Inspiron 5482, an 8th generation Intel 2-in-1 laptop with a spinning hard drive. After a few months of owning it, I started noticing that it wasn’t sleeping properly. If I closed it, I could still sometimes hear the fans running even 15 minutes later. If I put it in my backpack, there was a good chance I’d take it out at 0% battery or to the fans running at full blast and the CPU dangerously close to overheating. Half the time the hard drive wouldn’t even spin down, which sure is nice when you’re planning to be jostling it around in a bag for a couple hours.

The worst part of this all was that Dell gave you no official way to disable Modern Standby. Windows itself isn’t any help, either. If the BIOS says it supports Modern Standby, Windows takes it at its word and completely disables the ability to enter S3 sleep (classic standby). There’s no official or documented option for disabling Modern Standby through Windows, which is incredibly annoying.

Another issue with Modern Standby is what can trigger wakeup events, and for how long. Supposedly, only certain built-in Windows functions, like updates and telemetry can actually wake the device up, but so can apps installed through the Microsoft Store.

Microsoft probably deserves most of the blame for this mess. It created the feature and has been (allegedly) pressuring vendors to implement it and discontinue support for S3 sleep.

This article is a wall of text spreading fake info. The sleep states work fine in windows if you have any idea how it works. And this has been the case for at least 8 years.

If you have any issue go into cmd type powercfg -requests and windows will tell you what is keeping it awake.

And doubling down if you really want your pc to wake if its off and you slap your keyboard just tweak your bios wake options and done.

I’ve just started turning off my PC when I’m done with it because a mouse farting on the mouse will wake it up. Also if I do manage to get it to sleep it wakes itself up every few hours to check for updates.

This has literally been a problem since Windows ever came into being. I remember long nights of wrestling with this garbage on Jurassic versions of Windows.

Btw, if my pc wakes up seconds after if try to manually via XfCE power menu, but sleeps fine by itself (20 minutes inactivity), what could that be?

This shit is so obnoxious I’ve started having to use hibernate again.

Potentially my mac does the same thing, but it doesn’t wake itself up stealing monitors, running fans at 100%, and becoming a space heater like the two windows computers I have. If it does wake itself up, then I don’t notice.

I had the same problem with my work-issued Thinkpad. No overheating, but frequently pulling the laptop out of the bag and finding battery dead. Solution I found was to bind the power-button to “hibernate”, and just using that any time I knew I was going to be putting it away into my bag.

One problem I ran into writing my first Windows Store application like 10 years ago was that Windows Store seemed to have no interest in mobile-style security where you request permissions one-at-a-time and only the ones you need - the intended workflow was that you either requested no secure privs and let your app be “untrusted”, or you made your app “trusted” and requested all the privs. This was actively recommended by MS.

Of course, this means “wake from sleep” would be something that every app would have permission to do accidentally, even if they didn’t want to.

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They can if they don’t use “Modern Standby” or whatever. My Zen 4 PC sleeps just fine, fans stopping and all. Just had to disable allowing network adapters to wake the device from sleep in device manager, else random broadcast messages could cause the standby to end.

Didn’t some tech youtubers talk about this a few months ago? I swear I remember seeing a video on this…

This also happens on Linux, after 20 seconds, my computer just wakes up 😠 (definitely not because I don’t have enough disk space)

My girlfriend laptop turns on in the middle of the nights for no fucking reason. As a Linux user this shit is creepy

I actually like suspend to RAM. Makes my laptop usable after sleep a bit faster. But absolutely not on Windows because then my fans are still spinning after minutes like many have reported. But I was simply able to disable that with a registry tweak and it’s now going to regular ACPI S3 when I close the lid. Is my Framework Laptop 13 (i5-1240P) an uncommon exception?

I have one laptop running Windows and I just changed the BIOS/UEFI setting so that closing the display turns off the computer.

Also handy for Linux distros with poor standby/sleep support.

neither does your car or TV