Microsoft is Forcing me to Buy MacBooks - Windows Modern Standby

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 hour ago, AngryPig said:

Unsure how related it is but my school had gave Lenovo ThinkPads to students around 2010 with Windows 7 and we had issues where if you shut the lid before it had finished sleeping or hibernating, it wouldn't complete the process. This lead to multiple laptops dying in backpacks (including my own) and eventually realising this issue, having to recommend to students to make sure the power indicator light switched off before closing the lid. And given this was a bunch of teenagers with free laptops, that advice wasn't exactly followed

I remember that issue with my Toshiba Satellite back when I had that. Seemed like it's a Windows 7 issue for the most part.

[stecman]

@AlexTheGreatish The Modern Standby docs mention a built-in tool called SleepStudy, which generates a report of recent connected standby sessions that ran on battery for more than 10 minutes. It looks like this would let you identify what's responsible for a hot-bag incident. or what keeps stealing your battery life:

 

# Needs to be run as administrator. Writes an HTML file to the current dir
powercfg /sleepstudy /duration 7

 

The standby->unplug vs unplug->standby theory may be verifiable by writing a Windows service that logs to memory periodically, since third-party services are allowed to run under modern standby state, throttled to max 1 second every 30 seconds.

 

[GodAtum]

I don't see the problem. I've never needed to put my laptop to sleep I just shut it down. 

[0de]

Just wanted to let everyone that you hit the mark with the "system doesn't know it was unplugged during sleep" thing. This is something I experienced while using my laptop docked at home and undocked at college. I had it set so closing the lid didn't put the machine to sleep so I could tuck it off to the side and use my (much more than "60% of NTSC") screen instead. What I noticed was that, if I unplugged the laptop first and then closed the lid, everything was fine and dandy, but if I closed the lid and THEN unplugged it, it would keep doing whatever the hell it was doing before since it WASN'T GOING TO SLEEP! Similarly, it wouldn't just automagically wake up when plugged in even though the sleep settings clearly set it to not be asleep when plugged in - the system didn't know the power state changed because the lid was closed and it didn't get any additional signals about it, and for some reason, Windows doesn't forward the "hey dumbass, you're unplugged now" signal to the sleep state management part of the OS.

 

So yes, Windows doesn't detect power state changes when the lid is closed or the system is in sleep. What's particularly hilarious is that every other part of the OS gets the memo - Geforce Experience would limit my FPS to 30, even my power plan would change straight to "Optimize for Battery Life". The only thing that didn't work? Sleep states, the one thing I really, REALLY need to work if I don't want to pull out a smoking plastic brick out of my backpack and be left begging a classmate for notes.

[kokosnh]

as the IT worker, I never use the sleep function in laptops. I just always power it down (and restart it one in a while, as restart is actually different from shutting it down)
It takes it 7-15 seconds to start up with fast boot in UEFi, why bother with sleep, and drain you battery even little bit? 
If the 15 seconds it take to start up a laptop from OFF, is ever a problem in my work, then I need to change my job...   

 

We even disable sleep in the AD for all PC in the company, as PC wouldn't update some AD PC policies, if people just put them to sleep all the time.

[W.D. Stevens]

I had a laptop a year or two ago that had this issue but it was much more the overheating issue and seemed to happen really frequently. One time I opened my laptop to see that the heat had melted a small part of my display so I had a little bubble on it for the rest of its life. I was not greatly impressed and set it to hibernate when closed instead.

[ang3l12]

51 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

I just always power it down (and restart it one in a while, as restart is actually different from shutting it down)

do yourself a favor and disable Fast Startup using Group Policy. Its some actual craziness that happened at microsoft when they decided that "Shut Down" wouldn't actually shut down the PC. We kept getting helpdesk tickets where the user would say they shut down every night, so why should they have to reboot to try to fix an issue, and since disabling Fast Startup, a shut down actually shuts it down.

[hishnash]

Yet another pain point of modern UEFI based systems.

Yes they are great from the os vendors as the abstraction of hardware features to the UEFI makes things much simpler but the down side is moving the burden of software/firmware development to the company that has the lowest margin means the least effort possible is put in. Only features that sell well on built point product pages are considered and things like this and security are almost always utterly ignored.

 

But that said the modern UEFI systems is what allows for many different vendors to sell more or less compatible components to consumers to be able to run (windows or linux) without needing explicit kernel level development by the os vendor for each an every target hardware. 

 

In the days before modern UEFI the bios would more or less completely hand over the system to the OS on boot and not be so envlved this meant the software dev workload the BIOS dev teams was less as they were mostly consrned with pre-boot and hardware init but once the os booted the OS had directly controle over the hardware rather than interfacing through UEFI as it does today (yes your UEFI code is always running in the background on a modern system). 
 

[SansVarnic]

Here's a really useful suggestion, there is this feature called 'shut down'. I have never had a battery drain problem using this. <mind blown>

[Bitter]

3 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

Here's a really useful suggestion, there is this feature called 'shut down'. I have never had a battery drain problem using this. <mind blown>

 

[LloydLynx]

Years ago, I had a BIOS Piledriver system with Win10. Sometimes it would wake itself from sleep for seemingly no reason. Later I found out it would always happen when updates were available. Like, it wouldn't even update in the background if I left it. It would just turn on every 10 minutes while I'm trying to go to bed and piss me off. 

[MSharpeWriter]

4 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

Here's a really useful suggestion, there is this feature called 'shut down'. I have never had a battery drain problem using this. <mind blown>

You then have never had to sit though a cold boot sequence on a relatively Modern Laptop still running a "Spinning rust" HDD as the OS. I often had enough time to get a coffee and a cake, and eaten it before the log in to Windows screen. I actually have planned to swap this drive soonish, but this is not a daily driver at the moment.

 

My current laptop with SSD is ready before I can complete my order.

 

Yes, I've encountered a few Hot laptop bag moments myself. Most of them where with a Toshiba Satellite laptop from 2007/8, that was barely able to run Vista in the stock format. Fixed that with Hibernate until the Battery dies within minutes of unplugging from the wall.

[SansVarnic]

4 minutes ago, MSharpeWriter said:

You then have never had to sit though a cold boot sequence on a relatively Modern Laptop still running a "Spinning rust" HDD as the OS. I often had enough time to get a coffee and a cake, and eaten it before the log in to Windows screen. I actually have planned to swap this drive soonish, but this is not a daily driver at the moment.

 

My current laptop with SSD is ready before I can complete my order.

 

Yes, I've encountered a few Hot laptop bag moments myself. Most of them where with a Toshiba Satellite laptop from 2007/8, that was barely able to run Vista in the stock format. Fixed that with Hibernate until the Battery dies within minutes of unplugging from the wall.

Yes, yes I have. My first PC was 386DX.

My first laptop had HDD's.

My current Laptop has SSD's but you assume much my friend. Yet my point still stands, I have never this issue because I never had need to not wait the 30-60seconds for a cold boot. My life and expectations aren't that short.

[bogdanmoraru]

Hey guys I found a fix for Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro, if you are feeling ok with this tutorial (3.1 point), go ahead and do it, it solved my problem with sleeping.

[swimtome]

35 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

Here's a really useful suggestion, there is this feature called 'shut down'. I have never had a battery drain problem using this. <mind blown>

 

2 hours ago, GodAtum said:

I don't see the problem. I've never needed to put my laptop to sleep I just shut it down. 

Was surprised I’m not seeing this more. Maybe some of us are older and used to 69 second boot time with hard drives; so when 10 second boot time came with SSD it’s fast enough to us. 
 

Back in the Windows 7 days I got in the habit of having lid close do nothing cause I was often running stuff. Unfortunately this meant I sometimes forgot and threw it in my bag while on so it obviously cooked and drained. But this led me to get into the habit of shutting down if I’m not doing anything. 
 

Computers are not smartphones and need reboots. It’s orders of magnitude more complicated* then a smartphone OS.  On all my desktops I see Windows quirky behavior (especially multi monitors) if the uptime is more then a few days. 

TO BE CLEAR: This is dumb and Microsoft should have never released it if it wasn’t tested on many laptops. People should be able to use their laptops how they want and closing the lid to sleep is perfectly justifiable.  It’s LAUGHABLE that there’s actually a choice given by Apple that Window’s doesn’t have. 
 

But IMHO if you can wait 10 seconds just shut the damn thing off. You’ll also force yourself to clean up startup crap off your laptop. 

 

*(in the sense that there’s probably a lot more decades of spaghetti code then a modern smartphone)

[Blademaster91]

44 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

Here's a really useful suggestion, there is this feature called 'shut down'. I have never had a battery drain problem using this. <mind blown>

I agree, I don't really see what the problem is here as shutting down isn't a problem at all, especially on a laptop with an ssd.

[Neroon]

44 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

Here's a really useful suggestion, there is this feature called 'shut down'. I have never had a battery drain problem using this. <mind blown>

But the whole idea is that you don't have to, that everything is always where you left it.

I'm one of those people who does shut it completely down pretty much always, but I would say that this behaviour was created due to bad experiences with battery management.

 

I think the majority finds this annoying, but for people constantly working on them, moving from place to place and really relying on proper battery life, this has to be super frustrating. You get a laptop that promised like 10-15 hours of battery life, only to die while not using it.

[Results45]

5 hours ago, Senzelian said:

Just checked my Lenovo P1 and neither S1, S2 nor S0 are supported. Only S3 is and Hibernate. I guess this is due to the relatively old Xeon E-2176M.

Edit: I never experienced this tho, as I always shut down my notebooks. 

Same here. I always just hibernate.

 

I can definitely imagine Modern Standby being pretty convenient if all the added benefits can be had without consistently draining the battery, but is it really that much better in its current state than Hibernate and waiting a literal couple extra seconds?

[D13H4RD]

46 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

I agree, I don't really see what the problem is here as shutting down isn't a problem at all, especially on a laptop with an ssd.

The thing is though, some of us put our laptops to sleep not necessarily because we can't sit through 5-10 seconds of booting up. A lot of us put it to sleep because we want to keep our session in the exact state it was in so that we can quickly resume work when we go back to use the machine.

 

It's because of this, and the mess with Modern Standby, that I pretty much have to set the system to hibernate when closing the lid, which seems to be the "ideal compromise" at this point. Didn't really have to think much about that with my MacBook Pro, but it's not infallible as well, which is why they did the thing Microsoft somehow undid, which is to allow the user to easily tweak the sleep behavior.

 

My point still stands though. This is something Microsoft needs to fix, even if it's something simple as allowing the user to easily tweak the sleep behavior.

[hishnash]

One thing MS should be doing, and I am sure they are not is with modern standby if it does wake up they should only use the e-cores on these modern chips and even then rate limit the clock speeds to be ultra low. There is no reason the device should get even close to warm even if it does way up when the lid without a screen attached it should be in an ultra low power mode (single core limited to the cpu min clock speed... after all that is all you need to download an update). 

[Middcore]

If you're using a laptop that still has an HDD, that's the first problem you should be addressing.

[Luscious]

5 hours ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

it's stupid to run a system that no longer gets security patches. that's all i'll say on the subject. 

Windows 7 is still in extended support until 2024. Even nVidia is still providing 30/40 series drivers for it.

 

Yet to come across any security related issues on my end. I'll see in two years what OS options there are, but as I said, the damn thing continues to just work.

[SansVarnic]

2 hours ago, Neroon said:

But the whole idea is that you don't have to, that everything is always where you left it.

I'm one of those people who does shut it completely down pretty much always, but I would say that this behaviour was created due to bad experiences with battery management.

 

I think the majority finds this annoying, but for people constantly working on them, moving from place to place and really relying on proper battery life, this has to be super frustrating. You get a laptop that promised like 10-15 hours of battery life, only to die while not using it.

Yes, it can be annoying, but that is not my point. As @swimtome points out quite well and I agree. PC/laptops need more periodic reboots and as I mentioned, nobody is in such a hurry not to wait the extra 30seconds to boot. It's called the culture of convenience and it's something we have developed over time that has led to a culture of impatience.

I agree that things should work as expected especially when it wasn't broken to start and became broke by design by choice; but then again expectations fail when reality stands in the way sometimes and we should be prepared to work around and have alternate solutions for such things. 

Should Microsoft and hardware developers correct this? Yes, absolutley. But there are much better things to spend one's time worrying or fussing over rather than this miniscule non-life inhibiting inconvenience.

 

I am a man of many things, but a lack of situational awareness and critical thinking has never been my weakness.

 

*edit: I should add.

The sleep state was never intended for prolonged periods of time, it was intended for short periods of time such as 15mins to an hour and maybe two. The sleep state wasn't designed to make your laptop passive for 3-10 to 72hr periods and maintain a battery life. Thinking otherwise is obnoxious. When you expect to walk away for longer than 2 or so hours, shut it down, then this will give you the expected run time. Its a mobile pc not a tablet or smartphone designed to run in standby.

 

Edited December 4, 2022 by SansVarnic

[W.D. Stevens]

2 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

It's called the culture of convenience and it's something we have developed over time that has led to a culture of impatience.

While I do agree that we do get rather impatient these days, there's also nothing wrong with not wanting to wait when you don't have to. I'm not saying we're necessarily at that point yet but as we're likely to get to a point where frequently rebooting is actually not necessary, I don't think pushing companies to better implement features the way we want to use them is a bad thing despite it perhaps coming across as impatient.

[SansVarnic]

4 minutes ago, W.D. Stevens said:

While I do agree that we do get rather impatient these days, there's also nothing wrong with not wanting to wait when you don't have to. I'm not saying we're necessarily at that point yet but as we're likely to get to a point where frequently rebooting is actually not necessary, I don't think pushing companies to better implement features the way we want to use them is a bad thing despite it perhaps coming across as impatient.

I am only making a point of argument. Learning how to balance this in life goes a long way. 

As I stated, yes, they need to fix this, and I would like them to, we are on the same page and in agreement. Give them (these companies) this "inch" and they will let other things slide until it becomes the norm to make promises that will never be met and we start getting substandard products as a common thing. Hold them accountable but at the same time to not allow ourselves to overstate the inconvenience so much that it becomes more than what it really is. This video for all it is, I agree with Linus in holding them accountable, but he goes one step further than is necessary by making such a minor inconvenience more than what is minor. 

 

I'll go one step more, if I may, my original comment was a little satirical and not meant to be 100% taken seriously. But at the same time, I was a little serious, turning the thing off when walking away for more than a short time is imo the commonsense thing to do since it is a laptop and that is what to expect from a laptop. Expecting a laptop to act similar to any tablet or smart phone is unsensible to me. I have Surface Pro 6 and it's a tablet/pc and I expect the sleep mode to work as designed since it's a tablet. But if I had a Surface laptop I would Not expect it to last the same under sleep rather versus turning it off as I should do since it is a laptop.

 

Whan Linus mentioned the difference about laptop processors versus the tablet processor i almost expected him to say what i said above but I wasn't surprised when he didn't. I dont agree with Linus position on this specific point but I understand the reason why it was left out in order to make the point he was going gor and to the say the same I did, makes it look like he was walking back and would null the point of the video.

 

TL:DR Fix the problem but don't over-react about it.