Hacker News Reader

Comment by frosted-flakes | Hacker News Reader

Even Microsoft's own hardware can't get it right. I have a Surface Pro 3, and it will not stay in sleep mode. The screen frequently turns on for no reason at all, even if the keyboard cover is closed. I've taken to putting it in hibernate mode whenever I know I won't be using it for more than a few minutes, otherwise I'll come back to a dead battery.

But even hibernation doesn't always work. My custom-built desktop PC frequently wakes itself out of hibernation in the middle of the night. I don't even know how that's possible, because I thought hibernation was "off, with RAM saved to storage". Which is just wonderful when I'm sleeping in the same room.

View on HN

> But even hibernation doesn't always work. My custom-built desktop PC frequently wakes itself out of hibernation in the middle of the night. I don't even know how that's possible, because I thought hibernation was "off, with RAM saved to storage". Which is just wonderful when I'm sleeping in the same room.

This is generally using ACPI 'wake timers', which allow the RTC on the motherboard to wake up the system at a particular time (which I think is a useful feature, but only if explicitly requested by a user). Windows is particularly bad at this, since scheduled events are allowed to use this by default to wake up the PC when they are supposed to fire (and 'UpdateOrchastrator' has one which fires in the middle of the night). There's a decent bit of info on how to identify why this is happening and stop it here:

https://superuser.com/questions/1020768/laptop-wakes-up-from...

For me it's only my cat walking over the keyboard or mouse.

The third allowed option (Linux) is wake on lan, which is only triggered through my laptop. I automate WOL events sometimes over cronjobs, when the big machine needs to do some work overnight for some minutes, but very rarely, because it's too loud. But I do those wake up, sleep cycles occasionally automatically when the machine processes big events like the Berlinale, Cannes or Sundance Film Festivals.

Oh god thanks. This issue plagued me for the last 5 years, to the point I joked my desktop was possessed.

I’ve had this same issue with a different laptop. On my machine, any change in WiFi network or Bluetooth device availability would cause the laptop to spin up, prevent sleep, and drain battery. One trick is to turn off connected standby and switch to “disconnected modern standby”. That disables the WiFi and Bluetooth chips during standby, which should solve your issues. The only downside I’m aware of is that the machine will take a few seconds upon awakening to reconnect to WiFi and Bluetooth peripherals.

Alternatively, you can disable connected/modern standby altogether and revert to traditional S3 sleep. You lose that instant-on tablet effect, but it should fix the excess battery drain too.

I have that happen with hibernated desktops, where they would wake up randomly to do something then shut down again.

On some forums I read that people suspect its the virus scanner or some other scheduled task that is doing this. If someone knows why this is actually happening then that knowledge would be appreciated.

SP3 was their first experiment with "Connected Standby" and it showed. I had the same experience with sleep, as well as other problems like the wifi being unable to hold a connection. I wonder if newer models have gotten any better.

There are power mode settings in windows that you might be able to configure to alleviate some of the grief. I can't say how much of it will actually work, but if you haven't gone down that rabbit hole it's worth a try.

Double checked WOL and/or wireless device wakeup settings?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com