15 ms·

Microsoft Is Forcing Me to Buy MacBooks

395 points by xbmcuser 4y ago

slicktux 4y ago
Used laptop is all I need…keep the hard drive; I’ll install my SSD… Fresh install of my favorite Linux flavor and windows can blow off.
gtvwill 4y ago
- Kukumber 4y ago
  both apple and microsoft are bad, and yet apple managed to make a better laptop, cherry on the top, with ARM!
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    Microsoft does not really pretend to be good
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      It is surprising how long some things can survive beyond their due date. As a parallel; everyone knew the Soviet system was rubbish, beyond fixing, but stuck with a shrugging, de-facto acceptance of something nobody believed in and couldn't change. It was the momentum of stubborn ideology and resignation that kept it going. To me, Microsoft represent a similar failure mode unique to capitalism, where pure momentum of accumulated capital can prop up a dead company. In their heyday Microsoft were so successful and made so much money that today a mixture of memories, brand nostalgia and bought influence can keep the show going despite an abysmal product.
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        In the consumer market that is probally true Microsoft is still king of Enterprise because of vertical integration, centralized management / security tooling, and Microsoft Excel (which really has no competitor) Linux and Apple both lack the centralized end point management / identity / and configuration that AD, Azure AD, Group Policy, ConfigMgr, etc offer for the windows platform
        nonrandomstring 4y ago
        I think you're right, but that further confirms my understanding of Microsoft as king of the hill of centralised, moribund, managed mindset facing a diverse, dispersed, interoperable zero-trust future.
        phpisthebest 4y ago
        Zero Trust is all the rage in Silicon Valley, and Startups... Zero Trust has almost zero traction outside of the tech sector from what I can see. Microsoft has even dipped their toes into the market, and some pieces of their "zero trust" type of tooling as gain some adoption (like Autopilot), but for the I think we are atleast a 10 decade or more away from wide scale Zero Trust adoption is most organizations, and in some ways IPv6 has a greater chance because it likely will be forced on organizations in the next decade where zero trust will not be Never underestimate the power of "we have always done it this way"
    - Kukumber 4y ago
      They do pretend to be good when they lobby European and other foreign governments or when they bribe them [1,2,3,4] [1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-settlement-idUSKCN1UH1P3 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-settlement-idUS... [2] - https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_corrupt_business/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_... [3] - https://emerging-europe.com/news/microsoft-pays-25-million-us-dollars-to-settle-hungarian-corruption-investigation/ https://emerging-europe.com/news/microsoft-pays-25-million-u... [4] - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-accused-of-spending-hundreds-of-millions-on-bribes-to-win-business-deals/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-accused...
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  You seem to have very strong feelings about this topic. You could chose Linux, it’s not a binary choice.
  - replygirl 4y ago
    2023 is the year...
    - bamboozled 4y ago
      This joke while funny, was old in 1999 and is certainly ridiculous now in 2022. I honestly can't think of there be any reason why one wouldn't run Linux on the desktop , it's perfectly fine, I'd say excellent for 98% of the tasks I do. Video editors, designers and photographers probably struggle a bit but I'd say nearly all of those people use a Mac anyway. I have both myself. Linux and an iPad Pro.
      - autotune 4y ago
        There is still the problem of gaming. With tools like CrossOver from CodeWeavers and shadow.tech things are getting better as well as some native support on Steam, but at this point I still need a dedicated Windows desktop specifically for gaming and nothing else (I use a MacBook Pro for personal projects, work, and Alpine for Docker to run production services at work).
        goosedragons 4y ago
        Besides anti-cheat gaming just mostly works these days on Linux. It's pretty nuts how much it's improved with things like Proton.
        autotune 4y ago
        I'll have to look into it again. I am still scarred from the early days of trying to get a given Linux distro working painlessly on the laptop.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  People who go on this specific angry rant always seem to have Android devices instead, which are worse in every metric. More data collection, worse privacy, worse security, shorter longevity and hence more e-waste. I once worked out that Apple's annual AirPod production would fill approximately a couple of shipping containers. Meanwhile if AirPods were made by an independent company, that company would be bigger than Twitter, Spotify and Square combined. Or about the same size as NetFlix.
- fulafel 4y ago
  - Elwood: What kind of music do you usually have here? - Claire: Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.
OrwellianChild 4y ago
Main takeaway here is: Unplug laptop from power before closing the lid. This (theoretically, per the video) will make the Windows sleep mode operate correctly without vampire drain from network usage.
pxc 4y ago
If you're a Linux user and you can get S3 support on your laptop's firmware, make sure to check out systemd's suspend-then-hibernate! It gives you the same behavior as macOS, so your laptop will still have good battery capacity if you close it and walk away for a whole week. (It's unlikely to feel like truly 'instant on' unless you're running an open-source UEFI like Coreboot. But S3 resume is still very fast, just a couple seconds at most.) Docs: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sleep.conf.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sle... https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-suspend-then-hibernate.service.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sus...
- BadBadJellyBean 4y ago
  Yes it's awesome. If you just shut the lid for a short time it's instant on if you open it again and if you keep it shut for longer it goes to hibernate. I think that is the perfect compromise. And with new SSDs restore form disk doesn't really take long.
- cypress66 4y ago
  Back when I sometimes used a laptop, I had that same feature enabled on windows. Is that feature still supported by Microsoft?
  - rahimnathwani 4y ago
    Are you talking about hybrid sleep? IIRC that does both hibernate and sleep at the same time, i.e. it writes memory to disk and then goes to sleep. I guess it would feel roughly the same, except: - unnecessary disk writes (for the times you slept only for a short time) - keeps using battery until power runs out (rather than after some interval or at some non-zero battery level)
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Note that suspend-then-hibernate is badly broken in some systemd versions. It will always wait until the battery is drained to 5% SOC before waking up and trying to hibernate - of course, this can easily fail and lead to lost data, plus a completely drained battery (with the ensuing wear-and-tear on the battery itself). What's especially broken about this is that options intended to set a different behavior for hibernation are ignored, the 5% threshold is effectively made mandatory. Fixes for this issue are apparently ongoing and not yet ready for release. Reference: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269
sydney6 4y ago
I don't even understand why Microsoft is forcing S0ix this hard, i.e. as i understand, forcing OEMs to remove the option for S3 via certification programmes, etc. Suspend/Resume is painful enough as is, with Thunderbolt devices on a picky pcie-connection and else, even with their "improvements".. What a state of affairs. Half an hour ago, my AMD Desktop freezed from suspend/resume due to a Mellanox ConnectX-3 NIC not properly resuming/entering from sleep. Gotta try to reduce the allocated tx/rx-rings from the kernel module, surely, then everything will be, must be good to go. Oh, well..
- zootboy 4y ago
  > I don't even understand why Microsoft is forcing S0ix this hard Because for whatever inexplicable reason, they've gotten it into their heads that laptops need to achieve feature parity with smartphones. Smartphones get to be always-on, so laptops apparently need to as well. It's completely ridiculous, and I'm quite upset at Microsoft for continually trying to destroy the PC ecosystem in new and creative ways.
  - sydney6 4y ago
    Microsoft has a lot of insight about the Windows ecosystem works and crashes, and i'm even willing to believe that there's some sane technical reasoning behind all this. Perhaps the state of S3 is indeed this FUBAR, let's not forget, that MS cannot control the windows ecosystem like apple does with MacOS. MS has no/very little power over OEMs not conforming or only partly implementing standards, and yet has to deal with whatever hardware customers stick into their ~2 billion windows installations.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      > that MS cannot control the windows ecosystem like apple does with MacOS. MS has no/very little power over OEMs not conforming or only partly implementing standards, I mean, we're discussing this because they are forcing S0ix; the question is whether this resulted in fewer buggy implementations, which I doubt.
leros 4y ago
I had a similar issue with my MacBook and the fix was even sillier. I plug my MacBook into a USB-C monitor, which also supplies power. Upgrading the monitor firmware fixed my MacBook sleep issues.
- nr2x 4y ago
  oh, I'll have to try that, my intel mbp does the same thing.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  The way Apple typically writes its support for third party devices assumes strict adherence to the spec in question, with funny things happening when they don't. Totally different philosophy from MS where writing in hacks to accommodate badly behaving/out of spec peripherals is just another Tuesday. With that in mind it's not too surprising that a display firmware update fixed your problem.
  - ComputerGuru 4y ago
    So few displays have field/user upgradeable firmware. Dell publishes info about the latest firmware on their website, but with no downloads. You contact them and say my monitor has spotty DPMS and I see I’m a couple of firmware versions behind, how do I update? They tell you it’s not possible. Might as well call it a hardware revision instead of a firmware version.
  - leros 4y ago
    That makes sense. I don't know exactly what went wrong but the MacBook was having trouble sleeping and waking due to something related to talking to the monitor over USB-C sometimes timing out.
ssdspoimdsjvv 4y ago
I thought my new laptop was broken when I noticed this. Certainly this could not have been done intentional. I would close my laptop at night and come back the next morning to find out my battery was dead (and quite hot). Did some Googling and found out this is just how it works nowadays. I then changed my power settings to have my computer go into hibernation when I close the lid. WTF Microsoft.
pbnjeh 4y ago
Finally, an explanation. I don't run around enough to care about quick/instant startup. Despite using the Windows 10 Windows menu Power command to "Shut down" my Thinkpad X1C6, I took it out of its bag the following day, on a few not too infrequent occasions, to find it warm and "doing stuff" (Windows Update sticks in my mind). Moreso than a lowered charge, the idea of it cooking itself inside its padded sleeve and bag caused me concern. After a bit of investigation, I settled on training myself to always open/use a command window to issue "shutdown /s". No more warm or hot, drained laptop since then. I agree with Linus: Microsoft's behavior and indifference WRT this problem is reprehensible. For me, it is another example of how Microsoft has not -- fundamentally -- changed since its E3 days. The 900 pound gorilla that we will, per force, accommodate. Amazing how entrenched such cultural mindsets are. By the way, the X1C6 as configured by Lenovo does not support S3. Since Linus, in his demo of a possible BIOS configuration change, was using a Thinkpad, maybe I'll get lucky with that option -- watch the video to see whether you might have such a fix for your system.
- sydney6 4y ago
  I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen6, and indeed there is the "Linux" sleep-state option, which has been working for years just fine for me. I'm running a Linux-based OS. Before Lenovo added this option via bios update (via fwupd:), i indeed had to manually manipulate the DSDT to achieve S3 sleep.
  - pbnjeh 4y ago
    Thank you!
  - bluedino 4y ago
    Even with Linux, sleep on my Thinkpads is still a coin flip
    - theatomheart 4y ago
      using linux + sleep = ur wrong. turn your computer off. sleep is a lie that never EVER did what it claimed. the only thing it's good for is enabling bad user behavior. period.
ncann 4y ago
I had a Dell laptop that's somewhat recent. It had Modern Standby/Connected Standby on by default, so I followed the instructions online to disable that and get back normal S3 sleep. Things went well until one day after a Windows update Modern Standby was turned back on again, and apparently the old way of disabling it no longer worked, as MS removed the option in the registry. Fine, I grudgingly searched and found a new way to disable the stupid thing. Things seemed well initially until I realized that the new way of disabling Modern Standby also broke Hibernate - my laptop couldn't go into Hibernate anymore (or couldn't wake up from Hibernate - I forgot the exact symptom). I hate Modern Standby with a passion and I wish it a painful death.
AaronFriel 4y ago
I've experienced this and arrived at the same solution as Linus' team recommends: unplug laptop, then close lid. This worked for Dell, HP, and Microsoft Surface branded laptops ever since S0 was introduced in Windows 8 or was it 8.1? Either way. It's even sillier when using a dock with the lid closed: unplug, open lid until screen wakes, then close lid. The real shame here is that the supply chain seems to be moving away from supporting S3, as the video notes, with hardware (CPU or motherboard) and firmware support disappearing in newer models.
lizardactivist 4y ago
"This allows laptops to perform small house-keeping tasks while they're asleep" - or to be remotely logged on to and operated, without your knowing. A computer system that is on and connected the internet while you thought it was turned off, is IMO an attack vector.
rPlayer6554 4y ago
I've had this exact issue with my Dell XPS13 and it pushed me to move to a MacBook.
chemmail 4y ago
Holy shit this is so bad now, even Macbooks and iPads are not immune. I have an older Macbook Air and Pro and the batteries both go to 0% in under a month, when they were shut down, don't know what they are doing. I also have 2 iPad Pro 11" that just drain sitting there, under a week it would be almost dead, i didn't even look at them. I thought it was something wrong with my iPad at first, but a second one does the exact same thing. It wasn't always like this. We still use an iPad 2 and 4 for CC processing and they don't need to be charged for 2-3 months at a time!!! It is definitely on newer devices. I have a Yoga 1 that i can have in sleep for almost a month and I can still have it turn on with some percentage of battery i can do a few things. What Microsoft and everyone else it seems, is doing is maddening, the batteries are getting worst, and you simply cannot just rely on a device to be usable anymore without being next to a power outlet and probably even waiting 15minutes before they can even power up.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Modern iOS keeps polling and doing stuff in the background regardless. I actually built two Shortcuts to simultaneously toggle low power mode and all wireless connectivity. I have an older iPad I use for videos and podcasts while exercising that lasts over a week by using those, with zero power usage in between sessions.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    I have found the same as GP. I have an iPad Mini Retina (2014?) and an iPad Pro (2018). I once ran a test with both of them in airplane mode, and the Mini outlasted the Pro by a mile. My hypothesis is that the Mini still runs iOS, and the Pro runs iPadOS. I think I started noticing the Pro standby battery drain after "upgrading" the Pro to iPadOS, whenever that came out.
- pulse7 4y ago
- crooked-v 4y ago
  With the Apple devices, you probably have the 'Power Nap' setting turned on, which tells it to occasionally silently wake briefly to get background updates (emails, notifications, etc).
CogitoCogito 4y ago
I run Linux and I always just turn my computer off. I don't say that to convince people to switch or anything, but more to explain that "off" really means "off" to me. For my workflow this works totally fine. I have my browsers set to restore the previous session. I open up whatever I was working on and I start up again. It seems so crazy to me that this isn't just a standard workflow. Computers with new SSDs start up so fast from totally being turned off that it never causes me any issue at all. There is an explanation in the comments here about how to activate S3 sleep on Linux, but who cares? I'm just amazed that something that is like 50 times faster than a decade ago is apparently too slow. Maybe I'm just old. It feels like I've totally lost touch with the way most people use computers today. (Not necessarily in a bad way.)
- ivan_gammel 4y ago
  Same for me with Windows. I just shut it down.
  - CogitoCogito 4y ago
    Somehow I thought that Windows now would even wake up computers that people "shutdown". If Windows won't wake up computers after shutdown, then I don't see why people don't just turn them off. I'm not saying that suspend isn't a useful feature, but given that it doesn't work I'm not sure why people keep using it.
    - ivan_gammel 4y ago
      IIRC, I had to fix some settings before it started working like that.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Windows does not have the appropriate support to restore the working environment upon a full restart - e.g. it can't even restart MS Word/Excel with the exact same documents in the same locations, much less the same for third party software. I could "just shut it down" on a Mac, which has this support, however, I don't need to because there the standby works as I would expect.
bhk 4y ago
I saw this with a Dell Alienware x14. In both instances, it appeared that the problem was caused by an automated Windows update that triggered a reboot, during which BIOS decided to prompt the user before allowing booting to proceed. My theory is that power management software is not loaded at this stage, so the CPU remains running at full speed. In one case, the BIOS screen that prevented booting was a warning screen that comes up when the laptop is attached to a charger that supplies less than 90W (!) ... for example, the charger built into the USB-C external monitor it was connected to. That's funny, I thought ... my MacBook can boot when it's not even connected to any charger at all! Actually, the Alienware will boot without a charger also, but complains self-righteously when connected to a 60W charger. Eventually I found a BIOS setting that appears to disable this behavior. In another case, there was an unrelated BIOS warning screen. I forget now what it was, but on a second attempt the reboot completed without any warning. Both cases resulted in a disturbingly hot computer. I could not find a way to disable automatic Windows updates.
- dagmx 4y ago
  Yeah whenever my Dell XPS 15 turned into an inferno, it was basically the same (not surprising given they’re the same manufacturer). Windows update triggered while the laptop was sleeping, went to BIOS where the device ran full throttle, and I’d find it just sitting there while being scalding hot. That was the last windows laptop I bothered owning. Other than maybe the ThinkPad line, the XPS line was the closest I could get to a MacBook Pro in build quality, yet I had tons of other issues like audio buzzing, swelling batteries, trackpad issues and just generally, a very plastic build quality. The one thing I do really miss though is the touch screen. I know it’s divisive but there’s something just nice in being able to touch the thing I want vs navigating to it via a proxy device.
jackvalentine 4y ago
My wife’s new last year laptop had this problem - and it was pretty embarassing since I’d convinced her that a) she needed a new laptop and b) extolled that with this one she doesn’t need to shut it down every time - just close the lid! “fixed” it by making it hibernate instead which kinda sucks.
glandium 4y ago
My (arm-based) Windows laptop has this problem, with the extreme case being that sometimes when I open the lid there's nothing opened because apparently Windows decided to reboot after an update... M1 macs also do something when sleeping, whatever that is, although they don't lose enough power for it to be a problem. The only reason I notice is that for some reason it sometimes connects to my 2.4GHz Wifi, which I then notice because it interferes with my bluetooth trackpad on another computer... That being said, I've also noticed that M1 macs lose more battery while sleeping than intel macs did.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  > M1 macs also do something when sleeping, whatever that is, although they don't lose enough power for it to be a problem. That would be the 'Power Nap' setting that allows it to occasionally wake briefly for background service updates.
SekstiNi 4y ago
I had this happen to my XPS 15 when I was a student, and within 2 years of purchase the battery had degraded by 80%. If I recall correctly it would last about 20 minutes before abruptly turning off, making it completely useless as a laptop. Absolutely maddening to hear that not only is this not an isolated issue, but it's also still not fixed (and apparently getting worse?).
fbdab103 4y ago
I am genuinely curious how effective a "celebrity" [0] making a call to action is for behemoth mega-corporation. This and other deficiencies in common software (Teams, Spotify, Slack, Discord, etc) have been noted for years and yet big corporations continue to not seemingly prioritize basic usability problems that impact everyday users. Just the other day Carmack was complaining about Google GPUs - will anything happen? At least there is a chance, unlike if thousands of other developers listed their grievances. [0] No offense to Linus, but he is not Beyonce.
RadixDLT 4y ago
dont get too confortable, apple is going the way of microsoft
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Over the last 10 years of using MacBooks, the battery and power management has only kept getting better.
Yizahi 4y ago
I was trained by MS that sleep mode functionally doesn't exist on Win PCs and that updates need to be installed eventually. So every day when I finish working I simply power off and optionally update laptop and PC and that plus morning boot wastes maybe a few minutes on a laptop, even less on faster PC. I honestly don't see why people are making such a big fuss about this, as to warrant wasting thousands of dollars and a lot of hours of time to switch operating systems. And MacOS by reviews is not without its quirks and issues, they are just different.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > So every day when I finish working I simply power off... This. At least I'm not alone. It's not rocket science.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    Not everyone wants to spend dozens of minutes trying to get everything they were working on opened again to where they were after turning the machine back on. The same reason forced reboots are an absolute disaster for productivity.
    - QuarterReptile 4y ago
      In case you haven't explored the thread, the function you're looking for is hibernate, which saves RAM to disk, shuts down, then on reboot restores your session.
      - at_a_remove 4y ago
        Updates, sadly, wreck all of that.
      - mixmastamyk 4y ago
        The function is called s3 sleep which has worked fine since the nineties.
userbinator 4y ago
Yet another example of something with "modern" in its name which is much worse than what came before. This trend has been so infuriatingly consistent that anytime I hear something advertised as "modern" I think "the only reason they want you to think it's better is because it's newer, not because it's actually any better".
- sockaddr 4y ago
  Yup. Modern often means “we re-wrote it and got 90% of the functionality but totally missed all of the thousands of edge cases the previous team worked so hard to handle in their implementation” What jumps to mind is macOS’s Disk Utilities app.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Newer often means better for corporate bottom lines rather than users. That’s why the telemetry can’t be stopped for even a few hours.
Krisjohn 4y ago
Our knowledgebase at work has instructions on how to disable Modern Standby. Shout out to Lenovo and their shitty laptops - never waking up from standby may have been how they started, but I know they're all going to end with dead USB-C ports.
- arcanemachiner 4y ago
  > they're all going to end with dead USB-C ports. Curious as to what this means.
  - Krisjohn 4y ago
    All the USB-C ports are slowly failing on all the Lenovo laptops we supplied to an important customer. Many have already required motherboard replacements to get the batteries to charge again, although whatever's been happening to the batteries as the USB-C ports fail has been killing them too. We've also had Lenovo USB-C cables fail, and Lenovo docks fry themselves.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
I've got an old SSD with a dual Linux/Windows boot on an old laptop. Being in Linux, issuing a reboot, picking Windows instead of Linux in GRUB and booting Windows takes less than 20 seconds. The argument that people "suspend" or "hibernate" or "close the lid" or whatever because Windows takes "too long to boot" makes zero sense. Just turn the fucking computer off. Windows boots in no time nowadays. I hate Windows. I really do. It's a mediocre piece of turd. Every time I need to help a relative with their Windows issue I'm reminded how much of a turd it is. But it's not slow to boot.
- seabrookmx 4y ago
  I don't think "time to desktop" is the reason people sleep their computers. When I close my laptop lid and then re-open it an indeterminate amount of time later, all my programs, browser tabs and what have you are where I left them. Just like how when I pull my phone out of my pocket, all my apps are where I left them. Turning the machine off means I need to re-open all my shit again. That's annoying.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    Hibernate also saves and restores your complete state, and doesn't require any power when off either.
deleted 4y ago
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bakugo 4y ago
The fact that computers can now turn themselves back on at any time without the user's consent to do whatever they want to do is absolutely mind-boggling to me, but what's way worse is the fact that this is actually considered normal and acceptable by most users. Where did everything go so wrong?
- weikju 4y ago
  A multitude of factors, one of which being that users refuse, are unwilling, or are unable, to learn how their tools work, therefore corporations have taken it upon themselves to shield them from having to do so, and have become the stewards/priests of this magical item living in their house/office/pocket.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  What exactly is the problem with most users finding this normal and acceptable? I assume that you have some personal dislike for this behavior, but can you really apply that to other people?
  - bakugo 4y ago
    Are you really asking what's wrong with people willingly being owned by products instead of owning them?
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      Until you prove that devices turning on without human intervention is equal to "people willingly being owned by products" then no, I don't see why I'd be asking that. Is that something you want to prove?
      - bakugo 4y ago
        Computers are a tool. The human is supposed to own and control the tool so he can use it to perform tasks. If the human wants to use the tool to perform a task and the tool says "sorry, I don't feel like doing that right now, I decided to do something else, tough luck", then the human does not control the tool, the tool controls the human.
brentcetinich 4y ago
I bought a new Z13 which is a Ryzen, I still have this issue on Windows I called up support to complain that the machine is boiling hot every morning when I take it our of my brief case. They sent a tech to replace the motherboard. Still have the same issue, not sure if I should bother calling them back. Luckily I also purchased the battery warranty (expecting this issue as I had a HP and a Thinkpad which had the same issue and I suspected it was a Windows issue) as I am sure this is destroying its life.
desertraven 4y ago
Only decades ago, it seems the user of the device was the master. Now it seems the other way around. If the user does not explicitly request something, don't do it. If I turn my device off, I expect it to be doing absolutely nothing. It's a little disconcerting, and I wonder what hope there is for user empowerment in the future? There's just so many layers in the stack, and users have high expectations about what capabilities they want from devices. I often envision a low-tech alternative, where everything is as simple as required. Where devices are tools, and not distractions. And we can still do everything which is necessary with them. The walled-garden effect makes it impractical to even design an alternative, because homebrew devices aren't supported by our institutions. The APIs aren't open. The solution is increasingly to remove devices from life, and incrementally introduce only those that are necessary. But complex and user-hostile devices are becoming the standard for what is required to interact with banks, government, and other important institutions. Does anyone see a possible out here?
- NovaVeles 4y ago
  > Only decades ago, it seems the user of the device was the master. Now it seems the other way around. "There are only two possibilities. Either the user controls the computer or the computer controls the user" - Richard Stallman
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    I'll choose to control the computer.
perryizgr8 4y ago
This should be the highest priority for Microsoft and Intel. It's a deal breaking problem for any non-Apple laptop. It doesn't matter if the laptop looks sleek and has windows hello and has gaming specs if the damn sleep function is broken. The frustrating thing is that I don't even want any of the features it provides. When I shut the lid, the machine should sleep, halt all processing, until I reopen it. It's not a hard-to-understand concept. I don't need updates in the background. I'll install them when I can. I don't need notifications; I'll use my phone for that. Modern standby is absolutely useless in the best case. And devastating to usability in the worst. Just nuke it, go back to normal sleep. Or at least give an option to users!
stephen_g 4y ago
As mostly a Mac user, I was amazed when I bought an Intel NUC to run some Windows applications natively at how bad the power management is. Part of it is Windows, but part of it was also the EFI firmware. You’d think Intel of all companies could produce a working computer, but no, the thing would literally just die when it was meant to go to sleep or hibernate, and wouldn’t wake up despite being in a semi-on state. You’d have to hold the button to kill it. After more than a year of the machine being out they finally fixed that firmware bug, but it still doesn’t quite work as I expect (now I think I’m on to some of Window’s quirks). Just things like it still being on after a day of not being used when it should have gone to sleep and things like that. It just doesn’t work like I expect it should, whereas my Macs tend to just do what they’re meant to.
- toast0 4y ago
  > You’d think Intel of all companies could produce a working computer Yeah, you only think that until you have your first Intel motherboard/computer. They might not be the worst at it, but they're pretty bad. I'd probably rather have an ECS board than an Intel board. > but no, the thing would literally just die when it was meant to go to sleep or hibernate, and wouldn’t wake up despite being in a semi-on state. Sleep definitely requires a cooperative firmware, but hibernate should work regardless of firmware (although windows was doing hibernate + sleep for a while). If it can turn off, it should be able to hibernate.
what-the-grump 4y ago
Didn’t watch the video but powercfg -h off gets ran on all my laptops to prevent battery drainage when lid is closed. Does this somehow not work anymore?
tekdude 4y ago
I wonder if this is in any way related to my laptop's tendency to go to sleep, get hot, and then never wake back up when the lid closed OR it put itself to sleep OR it turned the screen off... even when plugged in the entire time. These lock ups would occur every few days and always required me holding the power button to manually reboot. Somehow, me manually putting it to sleep (through Start menu or with the sleep button) is safer (not 100% though), so my current solution is to set the Screen-off and Sleep timers to 166,000 hours (disabling or setting to zero didn't work) and also only close the lid when the laptop is (supposedly) fully off. It's a used Asus that I bought off eBay, so I'm not too invested in figuring it out... but it is annoying.
Anderson8989 4y ago
I want free watching the youtube
jlokier 4y ago
Current work sent me a Dell Lattitide 7330 with Windows 10 Enterprise. It's not a bad little machine. Light, small, obviously designed to be portable. One of the first things I noticed was after I closed the lid to suspend on a full battery, walked 20 minutes to the library intending to work there and opened it to find the battery down to 80% already! Not a great start. As the lid settings are to sleep on closing the lid when on battery, I figured out the same idea as the article: Unplug power and external display first, wait a bit, then close the lid. I thought that was working, but after enough tries doing that, only to find it stayijg hot for hours in my bag, I'm confident the unplug-then-sleep method is unreliable. I've tried going to the Start menu's power icon and clicking 'sleep". That often doesn't work. It turns things off, eventually, but the fan keeps going and it stays hot about half the time. Sometimes it doesn't even bother pretending, and the power light stays on. I've tried to change the lid settings to Hibernate. Not available: Lid settings are set by remote policy, not user configurable except by local admin access to override policy, which I don't have. Under the Start menu's power icon there is no Hibernate option, of course. Doing "powercfg /a" as in the video, I see S1, S2, S3 and Hybrid Sleep are all "does not support". I'm reluctant to change BIOS settings on a work laptop managed remotely with a strict security policy. It seems I'm doomed to take the laptop out in the library and coffee shops and find it drained and very hot sometimes, even if I charged it before going out. But unpredictably. So I haven't found a reliable way to make this Dell laptop sleep yet. Hibernate and S3 are unavailable. I suspect Shut Down might be the only option, but it's a bit drastic and I'm not confident even that will always work.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Yeah, I ran into a similar problem with a Lenovo and set the power button to be hibernate. Worked so far.
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
I don't necessarily dislike the move towards managed devices, we need more explicit choices. 'self managed' , 'OEM managed', 'work managed', 'MSP managed', etc. The group policy technology already exists, we need these options to be surfaced a lot better.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Sleep, hibernate, etc. Who cares? I just want my laptop to act like it's shut off when the lid is closed. Just copy Apple. Exactly. Is that too much to ask?
egberts1 4y ago
Here I am (probably along with millions other) poised to buy an Intel laptop after 20 year hiatus (due to crusty older laptops and recently MacBook Pros), this is not looking good for Intel/Microsoft. Power conservation during non-use stage is paramount for us users who travel or have limited power available. Looks like our next laptop is going to be an AMD or ARM laptop with BIOS having configurable S3 support. And non-UEFI and non-ME (no management engine) too!
alexeiz 4y ago
Windows modern (or connected) standby sucks donkey balls. When my laptop is in the sleep mode I don't need it to be connected, I don't need it to wake up to check for messages (or critical updates or whatever else). I need it to conserve as much battery as possible. It doesn't bother me that the wake up from the standby can be a couple of seconds slower. I don't care about a couple of seconds I care about waking up with as much battery charge as possible. With modern standby Microsoft misses the point entirely. Now I have to actually shut down the laptop before I put it in a backpack because I'm afraid that it's going to wake up from the modern standby and run down all of the battery while being in the backpack. I'd rather wait for the laptop to cold boot but have most of the battery charge left than my laptop waking up instantly without any battery charge.
jeffparsons 4y ago
This is personally frustrating me right now because I'm trying to help somebody select a new laptop, and I'm finding that I don't have the confidence to recommend _anything_ anymore. This is the situation: - Switching away from an M1 MacBook because they can't stand macOS. - Happy with Windows or Linux from past experience. - Close lid, put in bag is an important workflow. - Something reasonably modern and capable would be nice, but doesn't need to be a powerhouse (don't need current gen CPU necessarily, don't need discrete graphics). Does anything on the market actually have reliable power management? I've been looking at the Dell XPS range, Lenovo Yoga, X1 Carbon, and Framework laptops today. But I can find power management horror stories for all of them, so I don't know what to think.
- schmorptron 4y ago
  I'm not sure on this, but something that runs coreboot would have a better chance at supporting the proper s3 sleep, wouldn't it?
- grandpoobah 4y ago
  My old Lenovo X6 Carbon had support for S3 sleep. Maybe you could go to a store and check all the laptops until you find one that supports S3.
- antifa 4y ago
  Decade of 24/7 jet engine fans on every laptop I've owned and "surprise furnace in laptop bag" is basically why I bought the M1 Mac, which is the first Apple device I've ever owned. If I can't stand MacOS for whatever reason, I can wait for asahilinux to modernize. If I had bought another intel leafblower, it would have still been a jet engine under linux. I can't go back to the craziness of chasing on horseback with a lasso the power user features and how/where windows moved/removed/unset them on every update.
- stu2b50 4y ago
  You could try a M1 macbook with linux on it?
- fsflover 4y ago
  This could fit your needs: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14 https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.
alphabettsy 4y ago
This was one of the things that made me return the last Windows laptop I had. I couldn’t trust that it wouldn’t be dead wherever I was going. I tended to just close the lid and slip it into my bag between classes as I had done with my Mac and would find that it often was very warm and had been running the entire time.
grandpoobah 4y ago
There's probably so many of us, who have just quietly moved to macs out of frustration. Two Windows laptops in a row over several years, I suffered with this sleep bullshit. Never again!
Haga 4y ago
karmakaze 4y ago
The title is somewhat clickbait in that the problem isn't only with MS/Windows but with the hardware vendors not supporting S3 along with S0 suspend states. The video itself says that some Framework and ASUS laptops did support S3 (presumably out of the box).
hanafudafan 4y ago

395 points by xbmcuser 4y ago

Used laptop is all I need…keep the hard drive; I’ll install my SSD… Fresh install of my favorite Linux flavor and windows can blow off.

gtvwill 4y ago

Kukumber 4y ago
both apple and microsoft are bad, and yet apple managed to make a better laptop, cherry on the top, with ARM!
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  Microsoft does not really pretend to be good
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    It is surprising how long some things can survive beyond their due date. As a parallel; everyone knew the Soviet system was rubbish, beyond fixing, but stuck with a shrugging, de-facto acceptance of something nobody believed in and couldn't change. It was the momentum of stubborn ideology and resignation that kept it going. To me, Microsoft represent a similar failure mode unique to capitalism, where pure momentum of accumulated capital can prop up a dead company. In their heyday Microsoft were so successful and made so much money that today a mixture of memories, brand nostalgia and bought influence can keep the show going despite an abysmal product.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      In the consumer market that is probally true Microsoft is still king of Enterprise because of vertical integration, centralized management / security tooling, and Microsoft Excel (which really has no competitor) Linux and Apple both lack the centralized end point management / identity / and configuration that AD, Azure AD, Group Policy, ConfigMgr, etc offer for the windows platform
      - nonrandomstring 4y ago
        I think you're right, but that further confirms my understanding of Microsoft as king of the hill of centralised, moribund, managed mindset facing a diverse, dispersed, interoperable zero-trust future.
        phpisthebest 4y ago
        Zero Trust is all the rage in Silicon Valley, and Startups... Zero Trust has almost zero traction outside of the tech sector from what I can see. Microsoft has even dipped their toes into the market, and some pieces of their "zero trust" type of tooling as gain some adoption (like Autopilot), but for the I think we are atleast a 10 decade or more away from wide scale Zero Trust adoption is most organizations, and in some ways IPv6 has a greater chance because it likely will be forced on organizations in the next decade where zero trust will not be Never underestimate the power of "we have always done it this way"
  - Kukumber 4y ago
    They do pretend to be good when they lobby European and other foreign governments or when they bribe them [1,2,3,4] [1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-settlement-idUSKCN1UH1P3 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-settlement-idUS... [2] - https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_corrupt_business/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_... [3] - https://emerging-europe.com/news/microsoft-pays-25-million-us-dollars-to-settle-hungarian-corruption-investigation/ https://emerging-europe.com/news/microsoft-pays-25-million-u... [4] - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-accused-of-spending-hundreds-of-millions-on-bribes-to-win-business-deals/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-accused...
nickthegreek 4y ago
You seem to have very strong feelings about this topic. You could chose Linux, it’s not a binary choice.
- replygirl 4y ago
  2023 is the year...
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    This joke while funny, was old in 1999 and is certainly ridiculous now in 2022. I honestly can't think of there be any reason why one wouldn't run Linux on the desktop , it's perfectly fine, I'd say excellent for 98% of the tasks I do. Video editors, designers and photographers probably struggle a bit but I'd say nearly all of those people use a Mac anyway. I have both myself. Linux and an iPad Pro.
    - autotune 4y ago
      There is still the problem of gaming. With tools like CrossOver from CodeWeavers and shadow.tech things are getting better as well as some native support on Steam, but at this point I still need a dedicated Windows desktop specifically for gaming and nothing else (I use a MacBook Pro for personal projects, work, and Alpine for Docker to run production services at work).
      - goosedragons 4y ago
        Besides anti-cheat gaming just mostly works these days on Linux. It's pretty nuts how much it's improved with things like Proton.
        autotune 4y ago
        I'll have to look into it again. I am still scarred from the early days of trying to get a given Linux distro working painlessly on the laptop.
jiggawatts 4y ago
People who go on this specific angry rant always seem to have Android devices instead, which are worse in every metric. More data collection, worse privacy, worse security, shorter longevity and hence more e-waste. I once worked out that Apple's annual AirPod production would fill approximately a couple of shipping containers. Meanwhile if AirPods were made by an independent company, that company would be bigger than Twitter, Spotify and Square combined. Or about the same size as NetFlix.
fulafel 4y ago
- Elwood: What kind of music do you usually have here? - Claire: Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.

OrwellianChild 4y ago

Main takeaway here is: Unplug laptop from power before closing the lid. This (theoretically, per the video) will make the Windows sleep mode operate correctly without vampire drain from network usage.

pxc 4y ago

If you're a Linux user and you can get S3 support on your laptop's firmware, make sure to check out systemd's suspend-then-hibernate! It gives you the same behavior as macOS, so your laptop will still have good battery capacity if you close it and walk away for a whole week. (It's unlikely to feel like truly 'instant on' unless you're running an open-source UEFI like Coreboot. But S3 resume is still very fast, just a couple seconds at most.) Docs: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sleep.conf.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sle... https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-suspend-then-hibernate.service.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sus...

BadBadJellyBean 4y ago
Yes it's awesome. If you just shut the lid for a short time it's instant on if you open it again and if you keep it shut for longer it goes to hibernate. I think that is the perfect compromise. And with new SSDs restore form disk doesn't really take long.
cypress66 4y ago
Back when I sometimes used a laptop, I had that same feature enabled on windows. Is that feature still supported by Microsoft?
- rahimnathwani 4y ago
  Are you talking about hybrid sleep? IIRC that does both hibernate and sleep at the same time, i.e. it writes memory to disk and then goes to sleep. I guess it would feel roughly the same, except: - unnecessary disk writes (for the times you slept only for a short time) - keeps using battery until power runs out (rather than after some interval or at some non-zero battery level)
zozbot234 4y ago
Note that suspend-then-hibernate is badly broken in some systemd versions. It will always wait until the battery is drained to 5% SOC before waking up and trying to hibernate - of course, this can easily fail and lead to lost data, plus a completely drained battery (with the ensuing wear-and-tear on the battery itself). What's especially broken about this is that options intended to set a different behavior for hibernation are ignored, the 5% threshold is effectively made mandatory. Fixes for this issue are apparently ongoing and not yet ready for release. Reference: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269

sydney6 4y ago

I don't even understand why Microsoft is forcing S0ix this hard, i.e. as i understand, forcing OEMs to remove the option for S3 via certification programmes, etc. Suspend/Resume is painful enough as is, with Thunderbolt devices on a picky pcie-connection and else, even with their "improvements".. What a state of affairs. Half an hour ago, my AMD Desktop freezed from suspend/resume due to a Mellanox ConnectX-3 NIC not properly resuming/entering from sleep. Gotta try to reduce the allocated tx/rx-rings from the kernel module, surely, then everything will be, must be good to go. Oh, well..

zootboy 4y ago
> I don't even understand why Microsoft is forcing S0ix this hard Because for whatever inexplicable reason, they've gotten it into their heads that laptops need to achieve feature parity with smartphones. Smartphones get to be always-on, so laptops apparently need to as well. It's completely ridiculous, and I'm quite upset at Microsoft for continually trying to destroy the PC ecosystem in new and creative ways.
- sydney6 4y ago
  Microsoft has a lot of insight about the Windows ecosystem works and crashes, and i'm even willing to believe that there's some sane technical reasoning behind all this. Perhaps the state of S3 is indeed this FUBAR, let's not forget, that MS cannot control the windows ecosystem like apple does with MacOS. MS has no/very little power over OEMs not conforming or only partly implementing standards, and yet has to deal with whatever hardware customers stick into their ~2 billion windows installations.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > that MS cannot control the windows ecosystem like apple does with MacOS. MS has no/very little power over OEMs not conforming or only partly implementing standards, I mean, we're discussing this because they are forcing S0ix; the question is whether this resulted in fewer buggy implementations, which I doubt.

leros 4y ago

I had a similar issue with my MacBook and the fix was even sillier. I plug my MacBook into a USB-C monitor, which also supplies power. Upgrading the monitor firmware fixed my MacBook sleep issues.

nr2x 4y ago
oh, I'll have to try that, my intel mbp does the same thing.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
The way Apple typically writes its support for third party devices assumes strict adherence to the spec in question, with funny things happening when they don't. Totally different philosophy from MS where writing in hacks to accommodate badly behaving/out of spec peripherals is just another Tuesday. With that in mind it's not too surprising that a display firmware update fixed your problem.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  So few displays have field/user upgradeable firmware. Dell publishes info about the latest firmware on their website, but with no downloads. You contact them and say my monitor has spotty DPMS and I see I’m a couple of firmware versions behind, how do I update? They tell you it’s not possible. Might as well call it a hardware revision instead of a firmware version.
- leros 4y ago
  That makes sense. I don't know exactly what went wrong but the MacBook was having trouble sleeping and waking due to something related to talking to the monitor over USB-C sometimes timing out.

ssdspoimdsjvv 4y ago

I thought my new laptop was broken when I noticed this. Certainly this could not have been done intentional. I would close my laptop at night and come back the next morning to find out my battery was dead (and quite hot). Did some Googling and found out this is just how it works nowadays. I then changed my power settings to have my computer go into hibernation when I close the lid. WTF Microsoft.

pbnjeh 4y ago

Finally, an explanation. I don't run around enough to care about quick/instant startup. Despite using the Windows 10 Windows menu Power command to "Shut down" my Thinkpad X1C6, I took it out of its bag the following day, on a few not too infrequent occasions, to find it warm and "doing stuff" (Windows Update sticks in my mind). Moreso than a lowered charge, the idea of it cooking itself inside its padded sleeve and bag caused me concern. After a bit of investigation, I settled on training myself to always open/use a command window to issue "shutdown /s". No more warm or hot, drained laptop since then. I agree with Linus: Microsoft's behavior and indifference WRT this problem is reprehensible. For me, it is another example of how Microsoft has not -- fundamentally -- changed since its E3 days. The 900 pound gorilla that we will, per force, accommodate. Amazing how entrenched such cultural mindsets are. By the way, the X1C6 as configured by Lenovo does not support S3. Since Linus, in his demo of a possible BIOS configuration change, was using a Thinkpad, maybe I'll get lucky with that option -- watch the video to see whether you might have such a fix for your system.

sydney6 4y ago
I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen6, and indeed there is the "Linux" sleep-state option, which has been working for years just fine for me. I'm running a Linux-based OS. Before Lenovo added this option via bios update (via fwupd:), i indeed had to manually manipulate the DSDT to achieve S3 sleep.
- pbnjeh 4y ago
  Thank you!
- bluedino 4y ago
  Even with Linux, sleep on my Thinkpads is still a coin flip
  - theatomheart 4y ago
    using linux + sleep = ur wrong. turn your computer off. sleep is a lie that never EVER did what it claimed. the only thing it's good for is enabling bad user behavior. period.

ncann 4y ago

I had a Dell laptop that's somewhat recent. It had Modern Standby/Connected Standby on by default, so I followed the instructions online to disable that and get back normal S3 sleep. Things went well until one day after a Windows update Modern Standby was turned back on again, and apparently the old way of disabling it no longer worked, as MS removed the option in the registry. Fine, I grudgingly searched and found a new way to disable the stupid thing. Things seemed well initially until I realized that the new way of disabling Modern Standby also broke Hibernate - my laptop couldn't go into Hibernate anymore (or couldn't wake up from Hibernate - I forgot the exact symptom). I hate Modern Standby with a passion and I wish it a painful death.

AaronFriel 4y ago

I've experienced this and arrived at the same solution as Linus' team recommends: unplug laptop, then close lid. This worked for Dell, HP, and Microsoft Surface branded laptops ever since S0 was introduced in Windows 8 or was it 8.1? Either way. It's even sillier when using a dock with the lid closed: unplug, open lid until screen wakes, then close lid. The real shame here is that the supply chain seems to be moving away from supporting S3, as the video notes, with hardware (CPU or motherboard) and firmware support disappearing in newer models.

lizardactivist 4y ago

"This allows laptops to perform small house-keeping tasks while they're asleep" - or to be remotely logged on to and operated, without your knowing. A computer system that is on and connected the internet while you thought it was turned off, is IMO an attack vector.

rPlayer6554 4y ago

I've had this exact issue with my Dell XPS13 and it pushed me to move to a MacBook.

chemmail 4y ago

Holy shit this is so bad now, even Macbooks and iPads are not immune. I have an older Macbook Air and Pro and the batteries both go to 0% in under a month, when they were shut down, don't know what they are doing. I also have 2 iPad Pro 11" that just drain sitting there, under a week it would be almost dead, i didn't even look at them. I thought it was something wrong with my iPad at first, but a second one does the exact same thing. It wasn't always like this. We still use an iPad 2 and 4 for CC processing and they don't need to be charged for 2-3 months at a time!!! It is definitely on newer devices. I have a Yoga 1 that i can have in sleep for almost a month and I can still have it turn on with some percentage of battery i can do a few things. What Microsoft and everyone else it seems, is doing is maddening, the batteries are getting worst, and you simply cannot just rely on a device to be usable anymore without being next to a power outlet and probably even waiting 15minutes before they can even power up.

rcarmo 4y ago
Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Modern iOS keeps polling and doing stuff in the background regardless. I actually built two Shortcuts to simultaneously toggle low power mode and all wireless connectivity. I have an older iPad I use for videos and podcasts while exercising that lasts over a week by using those, with zero power usage in between sessions.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I have found the same as GP. I have an iPad Mini Retina (2014?) and an iPad Pro (2018). I once ran a test with both of them in airplane mode, and the Mini outlasted the Pro by a mile. My hypothesis is that the Mini still runs iOS, and the Pro runs iPadOS. I think I started noticing the Pro standby battery drain after "upgrading" the Pro to iPadOS, whenever that came out.
pulse7 4y ago
crooked-v 4y ago
With the Apple devices, you probably have the 'Power Nap' setting turned on, which tells it to occasionally silently wake briefly to get background updates (emails, notifications, etc).

CogitoCogito 4y ago

I run Linux and I always just turn my computer off. I don't say that to convince people to switch or anything, but more to explain that "off" really means "off" to me. For my workflow this works totally fine. I have my browsers set to restore the previous session. I open up whatever I was working on and I start up again. It seems so crazy to me that this isn't just a standard workflow. Computers with new SSDs start up so fast from totally being turned off that it never causes me any issue at all. There is an explanation in the comments here about how to activate S3 sleep on Linux, but who cares? I'm just amazed that something that is like 50 times faster than a decade ago is apparently too slow. Maybe I'm just old. It feels like I've totally lost touch with the way most people use computers today. (Not necessarily in a bad way.)

ivan_gammel 4y ago
Same for me with Windows. I just shut it down.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  Somehow I thought that Windows now would even wake up computers that people "shutdown". If Windows won't wake up computers after shutdown, then I don't see why people don't just turn them off. I'm not saying that suspend isn't a useful feature, but given that it doesn't work I'm not sure why people keep using it.
  - ivan_gammel 4y ago
    IIRC, I had to fix some settings before it started working like that.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Windows does not have the appropriate support to restore the working environment upon a full restart - e.g. it can't even restart MS Word/Excel with the exact same documents in the same locations, much less the same for third party software. I could "just shut it down" on a Mac, which has this support, however, I don't need to because there the standby works as I would expect.

bhk 4y ago

I saw this with a Dell Alienware x14. In both instances, it appeared that the problem was caused by an automated Windows update that triggered a reboot, during which BIOS decided to prompt the user before allowing booting to proceed. My theory is that power management software is not loaded at this stage, so the CPU remains running at full speed. In one case, the BIOS screen that prevented booting was a warning screen that comes up when the laptop is attached to a charger that supplies less than 90W (!) ... for example, the charger built into the USB-C external monitor it was connected to. That's funny, I thought ... my MacBook can boot when it's not even connected to any charger at all! Actually, the Alienware will boot without a charger also, but complains self-righteously when connected to a 60W charger. Eventually I found a BIOS setting that appears to disable this behavior. In another case, there was an unrelated BIOS warning screen. I forget now what it was, but on a second attempt the reboot completed without any warning. Both cases resulted in a disturbingly hot computer. I could not find a way to disable automatic Windows updates.

dagmx 4y ago
Yeah whenever my Dell XPS 15 turned into an inferno, it was basically the same (not surprising given they’re the same manufacturer). Windows update triggered while the laptop was sleeping, went to BIOS where the device ran full throttle, and I’d find it just sitting there while being scalding hot. That was the last windows laptop I bothered owning. Other than maybe the ThinkPad line, the XPS line was the closest I could get to a MacBook Pro in build quality, yet I had tons of other issues like audio buzzing, swelling batteries, trackpad issues and just generally, a very plastic build quality. The one thing I do really miss though is the touch screen. I know it’s divisive but there’s something just nice in being able to touch the thing I want vs navigating to it via a proxy device.

jackvalentine 4y ago

My wife’s new last year laptop had this problem - and it was pretty embarassing since I’d convinced her that a) she needed a new laptop and b) extolled that with this one she doesn’t need to shut it down every time - just close the lid! “fixed” it by making it hibernate instead which kinda sucks.

glandium 4y ago

My (arm-based) Windows laptop has this problem, with the extreme case being that sometimes when I open the lid there's nothing opened because apparently Windows decided to reboot after an update... M1 macs also do something when sleeping, whatever that is, although they don't lose enough power for it to be a problem. The only reason I notice is that for some reason it sometimes connects to my 2.4GHz Wifi, which I then notice because it interferes with my bluetooth trackpad on another computer... That being said, I've also noticed that M1 macs lose more battery while sleeping than intel macs did.

crooked-v 4y ago
> M1 macs also do something when sleeping, whatever that is, although they don't lose enough power for it to be a problem. That would be the 'Power Nap' setting that allows it to occasionally wake briefly for background service updates.

SekstiNi 4y ago

I had this happen to my XPS 15 when I was a student, and within 2 years of purchase the battery had degraded by 80%. If I recall correctly it would last about 20 minutes before abruptly turning off, making it completely useless as a laptop. Absolutely maddening to hear that not only is this not an isolated issue, but it's also still not fixed (and apparently getting worse?).

fbdab103 4y ago

I am genuinely curious how effective a "celebrity" [0] making a call to action is for behemoth mega-corporation. This and other deficiencies in common software (Teams, Spotify, Slack, Discord, etc) have been noted for years and yet big corporations continue to not seemingly prioritize basic usability problems that impact everyday users. Just the other day Carmack was complaining about Google GPUs - will anything happen? At least there is a chance, unlike if thousands of other developers listed their grievances. [0] No offense to Linus, but he is not Beyonce.

RadixDLT 4y ago

dont get too confortable, apple is going the way of microsoft

Gigachad 4y ago
Over the last 10 years of using MacBooks, the battery and power management has only kept getting better.

Yizahi 4y ago

I was trained by MS that sleep mode functionally doesn't exist on Win PCs and that updates need to be installed eventually. So every day when I finish working I simply power off and optionally update laptop and PC and that plus morning boot wastes maybe a few minutes on a laptop, even less on faster PC. I honestly don't see why people are making such a big fuss about this, as to warrant wasting thousands of dollars and a lot of hours of time to switch operating systems. And MacOS by reviews is not without its quirks and issues, they are just different.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> So every day when I finish working I simply power off... This. At least I'm not alone. It's not rocket science.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Not everyone wants to spend dozens of minutes trying to get everything they were working on opened again to where they were after turning the machine back on. The same reason forced reboots are an absolute disaster for productivity.
  - QuarterReptile 4y ago
    In case you haven't explored the thread, the function you're looking for is hibernate, which saves RAM to disk, shuts down, then on reboot restores your session.
    - at_a_remove 4y ago
      Updates, sadly, wreck all of that.
    - mixmastamyk 4y ago
      The function is called s3 sleep which has worked fine since the nineties.

userbinator 4y ago

Yet another example of something with "modern" in its name which is much worse than what came before. This trend has been so infuriatingly consistent that anytime I hear something advertised as "modern" I think "the only reason they want you to think it's better is because it's newer, not because it's actually any better".

sockaddr 4y ago
Yup. Modern often means “we re-wrote it and got 90% of the functionality but totally missed all of the thousands of edge cases the previous team worked so hard to handle in their implementation” What jumps to mind is macOS’s Disk Utilities app.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Newer often means better for corporate bottom lines rather than users. That’s why the telemetry can’t be stopped for even a few hours.

Krisjohn 4y ago

Our knowledgebase at work has instructions on how to disable Modern Standby. Shout out to Lenovo and their shitty laptops - never waking up from standby may have been how they started, but I know they're all going to end with dead USB-C ports.

arcanemachiner 4y ago
> they're all going to end with dead USB-C ports. Curious as to what this means.
- Krisjohn 4y ago
  All the USB-C ports are slowly failing on all the Lenovo laptops we supplied to an important customer. Many have already required motherboard replacements to get the batteries to charge again, although whatever's been happening to the batteries as the USB-C ports fail has been killing them too. We've also had Lenovo USB-C cables fail, and Lenovo docks fry themselves.

TacticalCoder 4y ago

I've got an old SSD with a dual Linux/Windows boot on an old laptop. Being in Linux, issuing a reboot, picking Windows instead of Linux in GRUB and booting Windows takes less than 20 seconds. The argument that people "suspend" or "hibernate" or "close the lid" or whatever because Windows takes "too long to boot" makes zero sense. Just turn the fucking computer off. Windows boots in no time nowadays. I hate Windows. I really do. It's a mediocre piece of turd. Every time I need to help a relative with their Windows issue I'm reminded how much of a turd it is. But it's not slow to boot.

seabrookmx 4y ago
I don't think "time to desktop" is the reason people sleep their computers. When I close my laptop lid and then re-open it an indeterminate amount of time later, all my programs, browser tabs and what have you are where I left them. Just like how when I pull my phone out of my pocket, all my apps are where I left them. Turning the machine off means I need to re-open all my shit again. That's annoying.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Hibernate also saves and restores your complete state, and doesn't require any power when off either.

deleted 4y ago

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bakugo 4y ago

The fact that computers can now turn themselves back on at any time without the user's consent to do whatever they want to do is absolutely mind-boggling to me, but what's way worse is the fact that this is actually considered normal and acceptable by most users. Where did everything go so wrong?

weikju 4y ago
A multitude of factors, one of which being that users refuse, are unwilling, or are unable, to learn how their tools work, therefore corporations have taken it upon themselves to shield them from having to do so, and have become the stewards/priests of this magical item living in their house/office/pocket.
phendrenad2 4y ago
What exactly is the problem with most users finding this normal and acceptable? I assume that you have some personal dislike for this behavior, but can you really apply that to other people?
- bakugo 4y ago
  Are you really asking what's wrong with people willingly being owned by products instead of owning them?
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    Until you prove that devices turning on without human intervention is equal to "people willingly being owned by products" then no, I don't see why I'd be asking that. Is that something you want to prove?
    - bakugo 4y ago
      Computers are a tool. The human is supposed to own and control the tool so he can use it to perform tasks. If the human wants to use the tool to perform a task and the tool says "sorry, I don't feel like doing that right now, I decided to do something else, tough luck", then the human does not control the tool, the tool controls the human.

brentcetinich 4y ago

I bought a new Z13 which is a Ryzen, I still have this issue on Windows I called up support to complain that the machine is boiling hot every morning when I take it our of my brief case. They sent a tech to replace the motherboard. Still have the same issue, not sure if I should bother calling them back. Luckily I also purchased the battery warranty (expecting this issue as I had a HP and a Thinkpad which had the same issue and I suspected it was a Windows issue) as I am sure this is destroying its life.

desertraven 4y ago

Only decades ago, it seems the user of the device was the master. Now it seems the other way around. If the user does not explicitly request something, don't do it. If I turn my device off, I expect it to be doing absolutely nothing. It's a little disconcerting, and I wonder what hope there is for user empowerment in the future? There's just so many layers in the stack, and users have high expectations about what capabilities they want from devices. I often envision a low-tech alternative, where everything is as simple as required. Where devices are tools, and not distractions. And we can still do everything which is necessary with them. The walled-garden effect makes it impractical to even design an alternative, because homebrew devices aren't supported by our institutions. The APIs aren't open. The solution is increasingly to remove devices from life, and incrementally introduce only those that are necessary. But complex and user-hostile devices are becoming the standard for what is required to interact with banks, government, and other important institutions. Does anyone see a possible out here?

NovaVeles 4y ago
> Only decades ago, it seems the user of the device was the master. Now it seems the other way around. "There are only two possibilities. Either the user controls the computer or the computer controls the user" - Richard Stallman
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  I'll choose to control the computer.

perryizgr8 4y ago

This should be the highest priority for Microsoft and Intel. It's a deal breaking problem for any non-Apple laptop. It doesn't matter if the laptop looks sleek and has windows hello and has gaming specs if the damn sleep function is broken. The frustrating thing is that I don't even want any of the features it provides. When I shut the lid, the machine should sleep, halt all processing, until I reopen it. It's not a hard-to-understand concept. I don't need updates in the background. I'll install them when I can. I don't need notifications; I'll use my phone for that. Modern standby is absolutely useless in the best case. And devastating to usability in the worst. Just nuke it, go back to normal sleep. Or at least give an option to users!

stephen_g 4y ago

As mostly a Mac user, I was amazed when I bought an Intel NUC to run some Windows applications natively at how bad the power management is. Part of it is Windows, but part of it was also the EFI firmware. You’d think Intel of all companies could produce a working computer, but no, the thing would literally just die when it was meant to go to sleep or hibernate, and wouldn’t wake up despite being in a semi-on state. You’d have to hold the button to kill it. After more than a year of the machine being out they finally fixed that firmware bug, but it still doesn’t quite work as I expect (now I think I’m on to some of Window’s quirks). Just things like it still being on after a day of not being used when it should have gone to sleep and things like that. It just doesn’t work like I expect it should, whereas my Macs tend to just do what they’re meant to.

toast0 4y ago
> You’d think Intel of all companies could produce a working computer Yeah, you only think that until you have your first Intel motherboard/computer. They might not be the worst at it, but they're pretty bad. I'd probably rather have an ECS board than an Intel board. > but no, the thing would literally just die when it was meant to go to sleep or hibernate, and wouldn’t wake up despite being in a semi-on state. Sleep definitely requires a cooperative firmware, but hibernate should work regardless of firmware (although windows was doing hibernate + sleep for a while). If it can turn off, it should be able to hibernate.

what-the-grump 4y ago

Didn’t watch the video but powercfg -h off gets ran on all my laptops to prevent battery drainage when lid is closed. Does this somehow not work anymore?

tekdude 4y ago

I wonder if this is in any way related to my laptop's tendency to go to sleep, get hot, and then never wake back up when the lid closed OR it put itself to sleep OR it turned the screen off... even when plugged in the entire time. These lock ups would occur every few days and always required me holding the power button to manually reboot. Somehow, me manually putting it to sleep (through Start menu or with the sleep button) is safer (not 100% though), so my current solution is to set the Screen-off and Sleep timers to 166,000 hours (disabling or setting to zero didn't work) and also only close the lid when the laptop is (supposedly) fully off. It's a used Asus that I bought off eBay, so I'm not too invested in figuring it out... but it is annoying.

Anderson8989 4y ago

I want free watching the youtube

jlokier 4y ago

Current work sent me a Dell Lattitide 7330 with Windows 10 Enterprise. It's not a bad little machine. Light, small, obviously designed to be portable. One of the first things I noticed was after I closed the lid to suspend on a full battery, walked 20 minutes to the library intending to work there and opened it to find the battery down to 80% already! Not a great start. As the lid settings are to sleep on closing the lid when on battery, I figured out the same idea as the article: Unplug power and external display first, wait a bit, then close the lid. I thought that was working, but after enough tries doing that, only to find it stayijg hot for hours in my bag, I'm confident the unplug-then-sleep method is unreliable. I've tried going to the Start menu's power icon and clicking 'sleep". That often doesn't work. It turns things off, eventually, but the fan keeps going and it stays hot about half the time. Sometimes it doesn't even bother pretending, and the power light stays on. I've tried to change the lid settings to Hibernate. Not available: Lid settings are set by remote policy, not user configurable except by local admin access to override policy, which I don't have. Under the Start menu's power icon there is no Hibernate option, of course. Doing "powercfg /a" as in the video, I see S1, S2, S3 and Hybrid Sleep are all "does not support". I'm reluctant to change BIOS settings on a work laptop managed remotely with a strict security policy. It seems I'm doomed to take the laptop out in the library and coffee shops and find it drained and very hot sometimes, even if I charged it before going out. But unpredictably. So I haven't found a reliable way to make this Dell laptop sleep yet. Hibernate and S3 are unavailable. I suspect Shut Down might be the only option, but it's a bit drastic and I'm not confident even that will always work.

Pxtl 4y ago
Yeah, I ran into a similar problem with a Lenovo and set the power button to be hibernate. Worked so far.

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

I don't necessarily dislike the move towards managed devices, we need more explicit choices. 'self managed' , 'OEM managed', 'work managed', 'MSP managed', etc. The group policy technology already exists, we need these options to be surfaced a lot better.

phendrenad2 4y ago

Sleep, hibernate, etc. Who cares? I just want my laptop to act like it's shut off when the lid is closed. Just copy Apple. Exactly. Is that too much to ask?

egberts1 4y ago

Here I am (probably along with millions other) poised to buy an Intel laptop after 20 year hiatus (due to crusty older laptops and recently MacBook Pros), this is not looking good for Intel/Microsoft. Power conservation during non-use stage is paramount for us users who travel or have limited power available. Looks like our next laptop is going to be an AMD or ARM laptop with BIOS having configurable S3 support. And non-UEFI and non-ME (no management engine) too!

alexeiz 4y ago

Windows modern (or connected) standby sucks donkey balls. When my laptop is in the sleep mode I don't need it to be connected, I don't need it to wake up to check for messages (or critical updates or whatever else). I need it to conserve as much battery as possible. It doesn't bother me that the wake up from the standby can be a couple of seconds slower. I don't care about a couple of seconds I care about waking up with as much battery charge as possible. With modern standby Microsoft misses the point entirely. Now I have to actually shut down the laptop before I put it in a backpack because I'm afraid that it's going to wake up from the modern standby and run down all of the battery while being in the backpack. I'd rather wait for the laptop to cold boot but have most of the battery charge left than my laptop waking up instantly without any battery charge.

jeffparsons 4y ago

This is personally frustrating me right now because I'm trying to help somebody select a new laptop, and I'm finding that I don't have the confidence to recommend _anything_ anymore. This is the situation: - Switching away from an M1 MacBook because they can't stand macOS. - Happy with Windows or Linux from past experience. - Close lid, put in bag is an important workflow. - Something reasonably modern and capable would be nice, but doesn't need to be a powerhouse (don't need current gen CPU necessarily, don't need discrete graphics). Does anything on the market actually have reliable power management? I've been looking at the Dell XPS range, Lenovo Yoga, X1 Carbon, and Framework laptops today. But I can find power management horror stories for all of them, so I don't know what to think.

schmorptron 4y ago
I'm not sure on this, but something that runs coreboot would have a better chance at supporting the proper s3 sleep, wouldn't it?
grandpoobah 4y ago
My old Lenovo X6 Carbon had support for S3 sleep. Maybe you could go to a store and check all the laptops until you find one that supports S3.
antifa 4y ago
Decade of 24/7 jet engine fans on every laptop I've owned and "surprise furnace in laptop bag" is basically why I bought the M1 Mac, which is the first Apple device I've ever owned. If I can't stand MacOS for whatever reason, I can wait for asahilinux to modernize. If I had bought another intel leafblower, it would have still been a jet engine under linux. I can't go back to the craziness of chasing on horseback with a lasso the power user features and how/where windows moved/removed/unset them on every update.
stu2b50 4y ago
You could try a M1 macbook with linux on it?
fsflover 4y ago
This could fit your needs: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14 https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.

alphabettsy 4y ago

This was one of the things that made me return the last Windows laptop I had. I couldn’t trust that it wouldn’t be dead wherever I was going. I tended to just close the lid and slip it into my bag between classes as I had done with my Mac and would find that it often was very warm and had been running the entire time.

grandpoobah 4y ago

There's probably so many of us, who have just quietly moved to macs out of frustration. Two Windows laptops in a row over several years, I suffered with this sleep bullshit. Never again!

Haga 4y ago

karmakaze 4y ago

The title is somewhat clickbait in that the problem isn't only with MS/Windows but with the hardware vendors not supporting S3 along with S0 suspend states. The video itself says that some Framework and ASUS laptops did support S3 (presumably out of the box).

hanafudafan 4y ago