Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Microsoft is Forcing me to Buy MacBooks – Windows Modern Standby”.
Look at what you’ve done to a Microsoft. This lifelong Windows user has been forced to switch to a MacBook. Why well, because he’s got real work to do and he needs something he can actually rely on, and it’s your fault. This is no exaggeration. This is real.
You guys it’s happening and all because you can’t fix a feature that most people probably couldn’t even name modern standby. That’S right guys, after complaining about it in every single laptop video for the last year, we’re finally doing a deeper dive into what we consider to be the biggest problem with Windows laptops. In fact, it’s something that I’m sure that you have first-hand experience with. You know that thing where you fully charge your laptop, then you take it out of your bag, the next day to find it dead and as a bonus, probably hot enough to burn you.
Well, it took some time and there were definitely challenges, including discovering that Max can actually suffer from the exact same problem. But we think we’ve cracked it. We figured out what Microsoft hasn’t been able to in the last three years and we might even have the solution. Just like we have the solution to perfectly segue to our sponsor, build Redux takes the challenge and hassle out of building your own PC with configuration options, support guides to Aid you and competitive pricing versus building a PC yourself.
Why not kick up your feet and let build Redux handle it for you so head to build redux.com, Linus and start your new build today for a long time. I gaslit myself into thinking my it might just me, and then I moved on to thinking. Ah, my this laptop like ah this piece of junk never has battery when I need it, but then we started to notice this pattern, but no matter the brand Dell HP, Lenovo Microsoft, lga’s races, you get the point it’s bound to show up once in a while On pretty much every Mobile Windows machine, and no it isn’t just us.
We asked on Twitter if anyone had experienced the same problem and we received thousands of replies full of tales of hot dead laptops that should have been asleep and fully charged. What makes this problem challenging to diagnose, though, is that there’s no obvious pattern to it. One day, it’s fine the next day it’s not, and even when the battery is draining, it can take hours for the loss to be noticeable which makes testing take forever. We don’t know exactly what causes this rapid battery drain, but we did observe that the problem is more pronounced on powerful machines, which seems to suggest that whatever the background task is, we think it could be related to Windows update. It relies fairly heavily on your CPU.
So bigger CPU, bigger drain, but wait this laptop is asleep. Why is it running? Windows updates? Well, here’s the thing: in the past laptops came with S3 sleep AKA suspend to Ram when your computer is using S3 sleep. The processor is essentially off, but Power gets maintained to the memory so that when you open the lid, there’s no need to pull data off of your system drive and you can resume working basically immediately, but on newer machines, S3 sleep has been mostly replaced by Windows. Modern standby or S, zero, sleep, s0. Sleep could also be referred to as connected sleep, and it’s actually existed since way back in Windows 8.. But for a long time it was not the default, and even if you were using it, it was very easy to disable.
So why is it suddenly? An existential problem for Windows machines Intel in 2020 Intel introduced project Athena with the general goal of making laptops feel more like a smartphone, and there were a couple of really good ideas that Intel pushed in Project Athena like instant, wake better. Overall responsiveness and all-day battery life to help achieve instant wake manufacturers were pushed to use s0 sleep, a sleep state where the CPU remains on and connected to the network. This allows laptops to perform small housekeeping items while they’re asleep, and it can actually be pretty great. For instance, apps can continue to receive messages. Bluetooth audio can continue. Playing windows can update while you’re away from the computer like have any of you noticed that, for the most part, your windows install just stays up to date without thinking about it. Well, that’s the beauty of s0 sleep. The problem, however, is that this is in fact a laptop, not a smartphone, and I don’t necessarily expect it to work exactly like a smartphone. Also. X86 is very different to the arm processors that are used in phones and apple silicon MacBooks.
With my phone, I expect to be notified of a text message or a phone call, even if the screen happens to be off, and I also expect to plug it in at the end of every day, with a laptop, I expect to close it stuff it. In my bag, at the end of a Friday and then on Monday morning, when I come back to work, I expect to take it out and have roughly the same amount of battery left. The final straw that made me go Mac was before the Intel Arc live stream.
It was an incredibly hectic morning running around and there’s a problem that needed solving now. So I take my laptop and my backpack, which I made sure was charged the night before. Knowing I’d be very busy in the morning, Not only was this thing warmer than our retro polar fleece ltstore.com, but it was completely dead.
This meant that while I was troubleshooting problems, I could not get a charger’s length away from the wall, making me mad enough to stop using Windows altogether. Ah, I’m, judging by the comments on short circuit and Twitter, I am far from the only one, but after a couple of weeks with the Mac, it had a hat Pro 14 inch out of my bag, and it was dead, turns out. Apple has a very similar always on feature to Modern standby. But would you look at this? By going to the battery settings? There is a toggle for Wake for network access, I’ll change that to only on power adapter and have not had the problem. Since this Mac has been able to run and update and such while, it’s sleeping so long, it is connected to power, just as it should be, if only there was a fix that easy on Windows. That’S the worst part of this. There used to be when connected standby was originally introduced. It could be toggled in the power menu.
Then they got rid of that. So you’d have to use the command platform. Ao AC, override to revert your laptop back to the old S3 sleep mode. Then Microsoft nuked that work around in an update, but it was still possible to go back to S3 sleep through a registry edit until they killed that in an update as well.
Why is Microsoft actively making it so difficult to remove this clearly broken feature? Well, because the BIOS engineers at Dell, HP, Lenovo and so on, are lazy and didn’t bother to support both s0 and S3 sleep in their firmware. So if you apply any of the above hacks, it could actually cause your laptop to crash outright when it tries to sleep. This is particularly frustrating because both Intel’s 12th gen mobile processors and amd’s ryzen 7000 mobile processors still totally support S3 sleep.
It’S just that the laptops have crappy firmware that doesn’t to check. If your system supports S3 sleep, then if you don’t want it crashing all the time, go to the command line and type power, config a which will show you what sleep states are available to your device. Look down here where it says standby S3, and then you just have to hope that it doesn’t say the system firmware does not support this standby State.
Since, if you see that you’re, probably screwed, we tested this on a wide array of laptops in our office and only framework and Asus appear to have bothered to implement S3 sleep on their latest processors. But don’t give up yet head to the bios of your laptop by spamming, F1 F2 and delete while restarting and with any luck you might find a toggle for S3 sleep or something called Sleep state with options for Windows or Linux don’t be put off the naming. Even Windows users can just swap it over to Linux and should be good to go once that’s enabled you can still use the old registry edit from before, to restore good old S3 sleep. You can also set it so that closing the lid of your machine causes. It to hibernate rather than sleep, this resolves the battery drain issue most of the time, but because hibernate writes the contents of system memory to non-volatile storage, it’s a lot slower to pull it back into RAM, which kind of defeats the purpose of creating modern standby. In the first place, the strangest thing about all of this is that this battery drain problem should never have been a problem in the first place.
When checking the available sleep states with a laptop on battery, it states standby Network, disconnected meaning that when your laptop goes to sleep, it shouldn’t try to pull any updates, receive any messages and so on and so forth. However, if you plug the laptop in and check the power States again, it says standby Network connected to allow updates and such that’s when our light bulb moment happened. What we’re almost certain is happening is that if you are charging your laptop and you close, the lid it’ll go to sleep in network connected mode.
Then, if you unplug it and say Chuck it in your bag and go to work, the device is not recognizing that it has since been unplugged and remains in network connected mode. If there happens to be a Windows update or something, then, while it’s in your bag, congratulations, your laptop is now drained so the incredibly stupid temporary fix. If you don’t want to do anything else, that we said is to always unplug your laptop before closing the lid.
Maybe it’s difficult to verify this 100 because we’re basically trying to force a strange error that can take hours to unfold, but it’s the best guess we have for now, which, Frankly Speaking, is as far as we should have to go farther than we should have had To go because Microsoft you’re, a multi-billion dollar company, just fix it Windows. Modern standby, has been a crippling issue for the last years and I’m gon na just lay down the line. Here.
I’M not going to be recommending a Windows laptop over a Macbook until you’ve, either fixed it or re-enabled S3 sleep. What I can recommend, though, is this segue to our sponsor vessi. Do you ever struggle figuring out what to wear in unpredictable weather? Well, vesi says their shoes are 100, waterproof keeping your feet dry in the wettest of weather, they’re lightweight and easy to pack sneakers offer you reassurance when the snow and rain start coming down. Putting them on and taking them off is super easy and their shoes are made from cruelty free products right down to the glue, whether it’s a rainy city or a Rocky Trail. The herringbone tread design is there to help.
Stop you from slipping around so treat your feet with vessi Footwear and save 25 with our offer code, Linus Tech, tipsy.com, Linus Tech tips. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might enjoy another video about things that are broken. So why don’t you check out part one of the Intel Arc 30 day challenge .