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
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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
and judging by the comments on ShortCircuit and Twitter I am far from the
only one but after a couple of weeks with the Mac it
happened again I took this MacBook 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 slash 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 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 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 gonna 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
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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