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1. S3 Standby/suspend support. If your laptop supports that, you can close the lid and it will power ~everything except the RAM down (sometimes a USB port stil

1. S3 Standby/suspend support. If your laptop supports that, you can close the lid and it will power ~everything except the RAM down (sometimes a USB port still charges). In 'new' laptops, including almost everything Tiger lake and Intel, S3 is being phased out for Microsoft's "Modern Standby", known as S0ix (or sometimes InstantGo). This is much more like a mobile phone, where it stays on but attempts to use as little battery as possible. So, peripherals might shut down, but you might still be able to get critical Windows Updates or receive an important notification -- all while your laptop is unplugged, lid closed, in your bag overnight. This is pretty bad for heat, battery, and often not what you might expect. My new laptop uses about 15% battery overnight, just doing nothing. In the future, perhaps this mode will work as well as S3 used to for battery life, but finding your laptop fans on while it's closed inside your bag and getting really hot is not fun. This applies to lots of laptops currently. 2. A good screen. Brightness that goes high enough to be seen outside (400, or more) - and it'll usually auto turn down the rest of the time to save battery. Hard to go wrong on a Mac, but really variable screen quality across other brands and models. You'll spend a lot of time looking at the screen.

zinekeller 5y ago
> In the future, perhaps this mode will work as well as S3 used to for battery life, but finding your laptop fans on while it's closed inside your bag and getting really hot is not fun. This applies to lots of laptops currently. Modern standby was designed for ARM-based Windows 10 Mobile initially, but I do feel that Intel had plead to Microsoft to allow them to implement it too. Regardless, even the best Intel cores (except for their clean-room Atom designs, not all Atom-branded CPUs have these) runs hot that it's a disgrace that Microsoft haven't insisted on requiring S3 sleep.
grandpoobah 5y ago
Was going to post the same thing (albeit far more poorly explained). Isn't Microsoft embarrassed about this? This has been an issue for my last two laptops over the last 5 years. How is it acceptable for this problem to still exist? My Lenovo supports S3 sleep, but I didn't discover it until probably a year into having bought it, so at that point my battery's ability to hold charge had already been sufficiently degraded, to the point where I'm having to charge this thing every day when I'm mostly only using it for basic web browsing. I will never buy another Windows laptop, and if Visual Studio ran on Mac I'd probably switch my PC out also. I'm not a mac guy, I find MacOS fairly unintuitive, and really hate the placement of the Ctrl key, but at this point it's clear that Apple's model better lends itself to quality, and I'm sick of all the broken crap that is deemed acceptable in the Windows world. As I was typing this, a great example of said broken crap, is Lenovo popping up a MessageBox asking me to reboot to update my firmware. Didn't software developers all agree well over a decade ago that windows stealing focus was not a good thing? So why then is a top of the line brand in the PC world writing shit like this?
- allwein 5y ago
  > and if Visual Studio ran on Mac I'd probably switch my PC out also Not sure if it supports all the features you need, but it exists. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/
  - glenarma 5y ago
    That’s just a rebranded Xamarin IDE - but for .NET development on Mac, I’ve found JetBrains Rider does most of what the full Visual Studio package does
    - beermonster 5y ago
      Yes it's just Xamarin modified to look like a native Visual Studio for Mac. Much better off using Rider (also works nicely on Linux).
      - ddek 5y ago
        IntelliJ is still a little broken on wayland I think. Last I checked they were waiting on a patch to Swing, so right now it's only running under XWayland, it's fairly buggy and doesn't scale nicely. You also need to set some env variables or you'll get a blank screen. It still works pretty well though, which is better than any other similar IDE.
    - hoistbypetard 5y ago
      I like Rider better even on Windows. My favorite thing about Visual Studio on Windows was always the debugger, and I think Clion and Rider have lapped them there in the past two years.
    - ziml77 5y ago
      Seconding Rider if you're on macOS. It shares its analysis code with ReSharper, so it's extremely featureful. In fact, it's usually faster than VS + ReSharper because it isn't running two code analysis engines at once and it doesn't have to run the analysis out-of-process.
bestouff 5y ago
This ! Support forums from all brands (big ones like Dell or Lenovo, but also niche brands like Framework) are plagued with requests from unhappy users with their laptop dying in their bag. All because of the Modern Suspend feature. Let's hope AMD mobile processors will work better, and that we'll be able to find decent laptops using them.
- microtonal 5y ago
  I had an AMD Ryzen ThinkPad. It has all the same issues with modern sleep. The solution is to enable S3 sleep in the firmware. Unfortunately, even in S3 sleep, the battery would drain in a day. I am now back to a MacBook Air (M1) and sleep works perfectly. Life is to short to deal with the terrible state of sleep on Windows/Linux laptops.
  - Tempest1981 5y ago
    Thanks for the tip. I had a Lenovo Ryzen that would require a Win10 reset of WiFi after each resume. Frustrating. Finally got an Intel Lenovo -- no WiFi issues.
  - deckard1 5y ago
    I'm fairly certain that your Macbook is actually hibernating, and not merely suspending. This seems to be the case with my 2015 Macbook. Suspend alone will drain your battery. I have a Ryzen ThinkPad p14s with Linux. What you do is turn on S3 mode (they call it "Linux") in BIOS as you did. Then in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf you enable AllowSuspendThenHibernate. You can adjust the time. I have mine set to 30 minutes. I also have suspend set when the laptop lid closes. Which means when I close the laptop, it suspends for 30 minutes. If I open before 30 minutes, it resumes right away. If not, it hibernates. The battery will last for practically days if you configure it this way. You have to configure Linux to hibernate and this will depend on your setup. Just know that it is possible to use LUKS encryption and hibernate to a file (or partition). Another factor with my Macbook is that it seems to automatically resume from hibernate in the morning. Not sure what it's doing. Maybe it's keeping track of when I typically open my laptop. But you can get this same behavior on Linux with rtcwake. If using LUKS though, you'll probably need to use a keyfile rather than a passphrase for this to work. It would be neat if someone wrote a program that could monitor the time you open the laptop and automatically adjust the rtc wakeup times based on historical data.
yread 5y ago
You can mitigate it by configuring the power settings so that after 30 minutes the laptop hibernates. You lose your connected standby of course
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  That's hibernation though, so it takes way longer to wake up and also does a lot of I/O on the probably not replaceable SSD. (Also, why does your post show as being made on the 2021-10-14 when this "Ask HN" is from today? Wat)
  - jakub_g 5y ago
    Anecdata but my 5-year ThinkPad and 3-year Dell are doing fine (also a 10-year Asus). I've been always hibernating for the night. 16GB RAM, takes at most few seconds. I don't get this allergy to hibernation, is it such a killer to wait a few seconds when I know I won't be using device for hours/days?
    - ziml77 5y ago
      Takes seconds to resume and saves a lot of battery since the machine is truly powered off.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Sometimes posts get put on the "try again" queue by the moderator, where they are floated to the bottom of the home page to see if they will attract attention the second go-around. I don't know if that's the case here.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      Ah indeed, the Ask HN itself is from the 14th and various comments are from then as well. Seems like it got put through that process which causes HN to "fake" the short timestamps to make everything look like fresh discussion.
gadiyar 5y ago
So which laptops do a good job of reliably supporting S3 standby/suspend? Any idea if the Framework laptop does?
- chx 5y ago
  You can check which ThinkPad BIOS has the option at their BIOS emulation site: https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html For mine it's under Config // Power // Sleep State. Windows 10 means useless Modern Standby, Linux means S3. https://i.imgur.com/Y5CchL9.png https://i.imgur.com/Y5CchL9.png In this covid helped me because I learned about this before I cooked my expensive new laptop in its bag :(
  - lpcvoid 5y ago
    Wow, that is an incredibly cool thing for an OEM to offer. Never seen this for any other vendor before.
  - tlavoie 5y ago
    What does it mean if there is no sleep setting here? I haven't actually rebooted my P50 yet, but the simulator doesn't have this option showing.
    - chx 5y ago
      The P50 very well might predate this Modern stuff. Type powercfg -a and see: The following sleep states are available on this system: Standby (S3)
      - tlavoie 5y ago
        True enough, thanks for the info. I can't complain either way, whatever suspend mode I have works well and quickly. Hibernate does work (all under Linux here as a rule). I'll have to try powercfg next time I boot into Windows.
- sfotm 5y ago
tomp 5y ago
> get critical Windows Updates So you mean Microsoft can force your laptop to restart and lose all your work even when it's "off"? Amazing.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Not all windows updates require reboots.
  - lucumo 5y ago
    Most don't even.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Quite a lot more stuff supports auto resume after reboot, including unsaved Notepad files.
  - tomp 5y ago
    But not REPLs and Jupyter notebooks.
    - bloggie 5y ago
      nor Windows Explorer.
      - zweifuss 5y ago
        For the File Explorer it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced Value PersistBrowsers set to 1.
        bloggie 5y ago
        Thank you! This reminds me of the old annoyances.org that listed a bunch of little tricks to improve your Windows 95 experience.
baybal2 5y ago
> 1. S3 Standby/suspend support. Intel diasabled S3 in Tiger Lake
- pxc 5y ago
  What is the reason for this decision? Idgi
  - baybal2 5y ago
    Force everybody to use Win11, as a gesture to Microsoft.
- xdfgh1112 5y ago
  Luckily there are AMD thinkpads and they are great.
peakaboo 5y ago
Yep. The thinkpads I've had running Linux has supported s3 sleep but it feels like it's going away more and more. You start with a laptop at 80% charged if you use Microsofts stupid system. The more I use Linux, the more annoyed I get at Microsoft and how they keep worsening the entire pc experience every year. Users are not users, they are cattle to be managed by Microsoft.
- surajrmal 5y ago
  Is it really Microsoft's fault that vendors only listen to it? The fact is that Apple exists in it's own closed ecosystem, and Linux runs second hand on systems built for Windows. There are very few other folks dictating requirements. Laptop vendors for the most part don't want to be in the business of maintaining an OS. Companies like system76 and framework are the way to address this.
dorfsmay 5y ago
Also Linux does not work well in this mode (problems to wake up), so it is important to be able to switch it to S3 in the BIOS.
daxfohl 5y ago
Reasonably fast boot time. Yes my XPS seems to be booting about half the time I open it, due to power management or windows updates, which is annoying. But what makes that extra annoying is that it spends like 45 sec each time just in the BIOS step. What on earth does the BIOS do that needs so much time to run? (Other than this I do actually quite like my XPS. Though I do wish I had gone without the touchscreen. It's just annoying because you can't wipe grime off without it causing a touch.
GordonS 5y ago
I used to put my Windows 10 laptop in my bag at night, but every now and then I'd realise later that it had powered itself on, the fans were going nuts, and it was obvious really, really hot! I don't think it was actually installing updates (I use Enterprise eds), though I've no idea what it was doing. I've since started leaving it plugged in on my desk, and haven't noticed it turning itself on at all since then. Weird. Seems mad they'd try to install updates while not on AC power, and I'd think it's fairly common for sleeping laptops to be placed in a bag overnight.
- dorfsmay 5y ago
  Check your wakeup settings. I've have to use corporate Windows machine and for some reason they're all setup to wake up on some wifi/ethernet signal.
jrm4 5y ago
Bahahaha. Sorry, long time Linux user here. I just presumed the sucky state of this sort of thing was SOLELY due to my insistence on using Linux. Relatedly; seriously - besides the obvious "mindshare" and so on, and I suppose "mostly for the people here;" Macs I get, but why do people still use Windows?
- jkepler 5y ago
  Also a longtime Linux user here, and I have the same question: why do people keep using Windows? Everything I hear about it sounds superb frustrating, while for me, Debian stable has been rock-solid for me for years.
krzyk 5y ago
How does S0ix work on Linux? Is there a way to powerdown more?

zinekeller 5y ago

> In the future, perhaps this mode will work as well as S3 used to for battery life, but finding your laptop fans on while it's closed inside your bag and getting really hot is not fun. This applies to lots of laptops currently. Modern standby was designed for ARM-based Windows 10 Mobile initially, but I do feel that Intel had plead to Microsoft to allow them to implement it too. Regardless, even the best Intel cores (except for their clean-room Atom designs, not all Atom-branded CPUs have these) runs hot that it's a disgrace that Microsoft haven't insisted on requiring S3 sleep.

grandpoobah 5y ago

Was going to post the same thing (albeit far more poorly explained). Isn't Microsoft embarrassed about this? This has been an issue for my last two laptops over the last 5 years. How is it acceptable for this problem to still exist? My Lenovo supports S3 sleep, but I didn't discover it until probably a year into having bought it, so at that point my battery's ability to hold charge had already been sufficiently degraded, to the point where I'm having to charge this thing every day when I'm mostly only using it for basic web browsing. I will never buy another Windows laptop, and if Visual Studio ran on Mac I'd probably switch my PC out also. I'm not a mac guy, I find MacOS fairly unintuitive, and really hate the placement of the Ctrl key, but at this point it's clear that Apple's model better lends itself to quality, and I'm sick of all the broken crap that is deemed acceptable in the Windows world. As I was typing this, a great example of said broken crap, is Lenovo popping up a MessageBox asking me to reboot to update my firmware. Didn't software developers all agree well over a decade ago that windows stealing focus was not a good thing? So why then is a top of the line brand in the PC world writing shit like this?

allwein 5y ago
> and if Visual Studio ran on Mac I'd probably switch my PC out also Not sure if it supports all the features you need, but it exists. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/
- glenarma 5y ago
  That’s just a rebranded Xamarin IDE - but for .NET development on Mac, I’ve found JetBrains Rider does most of what the full Visual Studio package does
  - beermonster 5y ago
    Yes it's just Xamarin modified to look like a native Visual Studio for Mac. Much better off using Rider (also works nicely on Linux).
    - ddek 5y ago
      IntelliJ is still a little broken on wayland I think. Last I checked they were waiting on a patch to Swing, so right now it's only running under XWayland, it's fairly buggy and doesn't scale nicely. You also need to set some env variables or you'll get a blank screen. It still works pretty well though, which is better than any other similar IDE.
  - hoistbypetard 5y ago
    I like Rider better even on Windows. My favorite thing about Visual Studio on Windows was always the debugger, and I think Clion and Rider have lapped them there in the past two years.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Seconding Rider if you're on macOS. It shares its analysis code with ReSharper, so it's extremely featureful. In fact, it's usually faster than VS + ReSharper because it isn't running two code analysis engines at once and it doesn't have to run the analysis out-of-process.

bestouff 5y ago

This ! Support forums from all brands (big ones like Dell or Lenovo, but also niche brands like Framework) are plagued with requests from unhappy users with their laptop dying in their bag. All because of the Modern Suspend feature. Let's hope AMD mobile processors will work better, and that we'll be able to find decent laptops using them.

microtonal 5y ago
I had an AMD Ryzen ThinkPad. It has all the same issues with modern sleep. The solution is to enable S3 sleep in the firmware. Unfortunately, even in S3 sleep, the battery would drain in a day. I am now back to a MacBook Air (M1) and sleep works perfectly. Life is to short to deal with the terrible state of sleep on Windows/Linux laptops.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Thanks for the tip. I had a Lenovo Ryzen that would require a Win10 reset of WiFi after each resume. Frustrating. Finally got an Intel Lenovo -- no WiFi issues.
- deckard1 5y ago
  I'm fairly certain that your Macbook is actually hibernating, and not merely suspending. This seems to be the case with my 2015 Macbook. Suspend alone will drain your battery. I have a Ryzen ThinkPad p14s with Linux. What you do is turn on S3 mode (they call it "Linux") in BIOS as you did. Then in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf you enable AllowSuspendThenHibernate. You can adjust the time. I have mine set to 30 minutes. I also have suspend set when the laptop lid closes. Which means when I close the laptop, it suspends for 30 minutes. If I open before 30 minutes, it resumes right away. If not, it hibernates. The battery will last for practically days if you configure it this way. You have to configure Linux to hibernate and this will depend on your setup. Just know that it is possible to use LUKS encryption and hibernate to a file (or partition). Another factor with my Macbook is that it seems to automatically resume from hibernate in the morning. Not sure what it's doing. Maybe it's keeping track of when I typically open my laptop. But you can get this same behavior on Linux with rtcwake. If using LUKS though, you'll probably need to use a keyfile rather than a passphrase for this to work. It would be neat if someone wrote a program that could monitor the time you open the laptop and automatically adjust the rtc wakeup times based on historical data.

yread 5y ago

You can mitigate it by configuring the power settings so that after 30 minutes the laptop hibernates. You lose your connected standby of course

formerly_proven 5y ago
That's hibernation though, so it takes way longer to wake up and also does a lot of I/O on the probably not replaceable SSD. (Also, why does your post show as being made on the 2021-10-14 when this "Ask HN" is from today? Wat)
- jakub_g 5y ago
  Anecdata but my 5-year ThinkPad and 3-year Dell are doing fine (also a 10-year Asus). I've been always hibernating for the night. 16GB RAM, takes at most few seconds. I don't get this allergy to hibernation, is it such a killer to wait a few seconds when I know I won't be using device for hours/days?
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Takes seconds to resume and saves a lot of battery since the machine is truly powered off.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Sometimes posts get put on the "try again" queue by the moderator, where they are floated to the bottom of the home page to see if they will attract attention the second go-around. I don't know if that's the case here.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Ah indeed, the Ask HN itself is from the 14th and various comments are from then as well. Seems like it got put through that process which causes HN to "fake" the short timestamps to make everything look like fresh discussion.

gadiyar 5y ago

So which laptops do a good job of reliably supporting S3 standby/suspend? Any idea if the Framework laptop does?

chx 5y ago
You can check which ThinkPad BIOS has the option at their BIOS emulation site: https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html https://download.lenovo.com/bsco/index.html For mine it's under Config // Power // Sleep State. Windows 10 means useless Modern Standby, Linux means S3. https://i.imgur.com/Y5CchL9.png https://i.imgur.com/Y5CchL9.png In this covid helped me because I learned about this before I cooked my expensive new laptop in its bag :(
- lpcvoid 5y ago
  Wow, that is an incredibly cool thing for an OEM to offer. Never seen this for any other vendor before.
- tlavoie 5y ago
  What does it mean if there is no sleep setting here? I haven't actually rebooted my P50 yet, but the simulator doesn't have this option showing.
  - chx 5y ago
    The P50 very well might predate this Modern stuff. Type powercfg -a and see: The following sleep states are available on this system: Standby (S3)
    - tlavoie 5y ago
      True enough, thanks for the info. I can't complain either way, whatever suspend mode I have works well and quickly. Hibernate does work (all under Linux here as a rule). I'll have to try powercfg next time I boot into Windows.
sfotm 5y ago

tomp 5y ago

> get critical Windows Updates So you mean Microsoft can force your laptop to restart and lose all your work even when it's "off"? Amazing.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Not all windows updates require reboots.
- lucumo 5y ago
  Most don't even.
mavhc 5y ago
Quite a lot more stuff supports auto resume after reboot, including unsaved Notepad files.
- tomp 5y ago
  But not REPLs and Jupyter notebooks.
  - bloggie 5y ago
    nor Windows Explorer.
    - zweifuss 5y ago
      For the File Explorer it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced Value PersistBrowsers set to 1.
      - bloggie 5y ago
        Thank you! This reminds me of the old annoyances.org that listed a bunch of little tricks to improve your Windows 95 experience.

baybal2 5y ago

> 1. S3 Standby/suspend support. Intel diasabled S3 in Tiger Lake

pxc 5y ago
What is the reason for this decision? Idgi
- baybal2 5y ago
  Force everybody to use Win11, as a gesture to Microsoft.
xdfgh1112 5y ago
Luckily there are AMD thinkpads and they are great.

peakaboo 5y ago

Yep. The thinkpads I've had running Linux has supported s3 sleep but it feels like it's going away more and more. You start with a laptop at 80% charged if you use Microsofts stupid system. The more I use Linux, the more annoyed I get at Microsoft and how they keep worsening the entire pc experience every year. Users are not users, they are cattle to be managed by Microsoft.

surajrmal 5y ago
Is it really Microsoft's fault that vendors only listen to it? The fact is that Apple exists in it's own closed ecosystem, and Linux runs second hand on systems built for Windows. There are very few other folks dictating requirements. Laptop vendors for the most part don't want to be in the business of maintaining an OS. Companies like system76 and framework are the way to address this.

dorfsmay 5y ago

Also Linux does not work well in this mode (problems to wake up), so it is important to be able to switch it to S3 in the BIOS.

daxfohl 5y ago

Reasonably fast boot time. Yes my XPS seems to be booting about half the time I open it, due to power management or windows updates, which is annoying. But what makes that extra annoying is that it spends like 45 sec each time just in the BIOS step. What on earth does the BIOS do that needs so much time to run? (Other than this I do actually quite like my XPS. Though I do wish I had gone without the touchscreen. It's just annoying because you can't wipe grime off without it causing a touch.

GordonS 5y ago

I used to put my Windows 10 laptop in my bag at night, but every now and then I'd realise later that it had powered itself on, the fans were going nuts, and it was obvious really, really hot! I don't think it was actually installing updates (I use Enterprise eds), though I've no idea what it was doing. I've since started leaving it plugged in on my desk, and haven't noticed it turning itself on at all since then. Weird. Seems mad they'd try to install updates while not on AC power, and I'd think it's fairly common for sleeping laptops to be placed in a bag overnight.

dorfsmay 5y ago
Check your wakeup settings. I've have to use corporate Windows machine and for some reason they're all setup to wake up on some wifi/ethernet signal.

jrm4 5y ago

Bahahaha. Sorry, long time Linux user here. I just presumed the sucky state of this sort of thing was SOLELY due to my insistence on using Linux. Relatedly; seriously - besides the obvious "mindshare" and so on, and I suppose "mostly for the people here;" Macs I get, but why do people still use Windows?

jkepler 5y ago
Also a longtime Linux user here, and I have the same question: why do people keep using Windows? Everything I hear about it sounds superb frustrating, while for me, Debian stable has been rock-solid for me for years.

krzyk 5y ago

How does S0ix work on Linux? Is there a way to powerdown more?