Do not leave XPS laptop in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag | Hacker News Reader

standby mode when placed in a bag

dell.com

1,080 pointsbestouff879 comments

I stopped using my Microsoft Surface Pro because it had the same issues. It's a clusterfuck of bad design decisions at Microsoft, the most offensive one being that they prioritize the execution of their scheduled spyware upload (telemetry) over honoring the agreement with the user that a sleeping PC will remain asleep unless the user takes action. It'll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone. Plus as described here, many Windows 10 laptops will either burn themselves, or the battery will be empty whenever you need em.

I mean, I know it's too late to help you, but running "powercfg.exe /lastwake" after a windows computer wakes from standby will tell you exactly what woke it up, if it knows.

I've never had it return with "unknown" once in over a decade, but some people I know have.

if you can find all the things waking the computer, and fix those things, it will never wake without user intervention.

usually, for me, it's been device drivers which have permission to wake the computer from sleep by default, for some stupid reason. removing that permission on those devices has eliminated "hot bag syndrome" for me entirely.

I agree that these steps should not need to be taken. device driver authors are the source of almost all bad crap like this in windows.

I was chasing this issue with my previous desktop which, at the time, was in my bedroom. I've always preferred sleep/hibernate over shutting it down but when Windows decided it knew better and to constantly wake it from sleep in the middle of the night to do updates, filling my room with light from all the case/fan leds, I was about ready to go Office Space on the thing. What was worse, it wouldn't go back to sleep after the updates were complete.

Even worse, Microsoft made it so very hard to hunt down all the various settings and registry flags to disable that behavior, AND it reverted to those same settings after every major update. I absolutely despised that desktop for a while.

This is the literal reason I switched to OSX. I dislike the impractical design of Macbooks - horrible connectivity and no way to swap batteries.

However the combination of 15 hrs battery life + closing the lid and it not melting a hole in my bag trumps any negatives.

I feel using Windows for anything other than gaming is just going to give you more headaches than just learning to use a unix based OS. Most applications are available on multiple platforms and alternatives exist for those few applications that are not available.

In my opinion, the only reason why Windows is so prevalent in the "enterprise" world is because Microsoft provides support contracts to make it easier to adopt. Problems with your windows laptop? Send it off to Microsoft or open a business priority ticket to have them work on it for you. No need to hire an internal IT team.

This was the reason I returned my Surface Book 2 back in 2018. I got it out of my laptop bag one day and burnt my fingers it was so hot. Fans at 100% and it was sitting at 99C just one degree away from shutdown.

That plus a whole host of annoying software bugs with the detachable design, keyboard backlight not working until I reboot, etc. was just a horrible experience so ended up getting a refund and buying a MacBook Pro when the 2018 models came out. Sure it has the crappy butterfly keyboard but three years later and that MacBook Pro is still a fantastic machine that I haven't had a single issue with. Cost the same as the Surface Book 2 as well.

The new Surface Laptop Studio looks interesting but I am very hesitant to buy Microsoft hardware again. It looks nice but is plagued with issues even today from what friends and colleagues tell me. Real shame. Hopefully things are better with the new models announced this week but I will be sitting back and waiting a few months to see how they are in the real world rather than a 3 day review.

I actually had windows go so far as to start a laptop inside a tightly packed backpack around 3am for updates or whatever and restart chrome and start blasting YouTube advertising full volume when I needed to be up early the next morning. Disrupted sleep or potential house fire...Microsoft is beyond shameless and have been brazenly so for at least 20 some years now.

> It'll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone.

That reminds me of last time I upgraded my mac by doing the transfer from one machine to the other. When the new mac booted for the first time, it had the same unsaved documents I had open on the old one. Things have come a long way.

I found a solution on Microsoft's website: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s...

It appears you can instruct it to avoid connecting to the internet to do stuff while in standby. I hope this works since my Surface Book has bad standby drain after sitting on my desk for 2-3 days off charge.

The lack of respect for users is really shocking lately.

What's super annoying is that Dell does not provide a BIOS option to switch between connected standby and S3. It's likely a cost saving decision because S3 is more complex to implement and having both options even more so. There are also some rumors that Dell may be under contractual agreement with MS to only support connected standby.

My Windows laptop (Lenovo Ideapad S940) ran out of batter while presumably in the sleep mode in my backpack on multiple occasions. It got so ridiculous that now I listen to its fan after closing the laptop lid to make sure it really really in the sleep mode. I even went as far as trying to figure out how to revert back to the old S3 sleep mode instead of the new Windows 10 "connected standby", but it turned out to be quite a task (and I think it broke something else, so I had to revert things back).

I was given a Latitude 5300 2-in-1 running Windows 10 by a client for a short term project last year, there were multiple `big bro` installed on it so I didn't bother to tinker it much other than requesting local admin access so as to install WSL2 and Ubuntu in order to build a productive environment to get things done (implement a flavour of K8s distribution in fully air-gapped environment). BIOS is password protected so I can't even run USB Live Linux distros (to test performance of the hardware or play around).

Some interesting observations:

  1. fan spins crazily for no reason randomly, and the laptop seemed to be always heated (in comparison with MBP and other laptops running Linux).

  2. it can become overly hot and fan can spin even if it was in sleep! This was scary so after seeing it once I tend to power if off whenever finishing using it. Some times it didn't wake up, giving a QR code (BSOD...)

  3. the not-too-bad specs failed to pump out expected performance (so sluggish), in comparison with similar hardware running Linux x86_64 or macOS (not surprised)

NOTE: Feeling lucky that my kids school allows BYOD, simply picked M1 MBA for both to avoid the Windows debt (in most cases hardware is not to blame, I've used many Dell Latitude models with positive impression).

I've got a Surface Pro 4. It was great for the first year or so, when I was using it as a tablet on the couch for browsing, reading, and as a digital scratchpad.

I then got an iPad via a ridiculously good deal from Comcast (128 GB 6th generation (which was the latest generation at the time) for $120. The iPad took over most browsing, reading, and scratchpad duties, with the SP4 just getting occasional use when I needed something more general than the iPad.

What I noticed when the SP4 went from daily use to weekly or so is that the battery would always be low when I went to use it. Charge it up fully and shut it down...and a week later it needs charging again.

I believe that is because shut down is really some kind of sleep or hibernate. I've tried disabling all of those, and fast start. I've tried shutting down from the start menu, with and without the modifiers that are supposed to make it really shut down. I've tried command line commands that are supposed to really shut it down. I've tried shutting down from the BIOS.

But no matter what I do it consumes significant power while off. If I leave it on the charger so that it will be ready when I need it, it seems to charge to full, then stop charging until the battery drains a bit, and then repeats that cycles.

The result is after a couple years of sporadic use, the battery was degraded enough that now just using it for light browsing I'm lucky if I get 30 minutes of battery time. So now it is pretty much relegated to only being usable when hooked to external power.

I'm never buying another Surface product. And I'm not buying any Windows laptops or tablets unless there is some reasonable way to definitely turn them all the way off and have them stay that way.

Yes I had a Surface Pro 3 with Linux on it and it still woke up in my bag sometimes. I'd take it out and it'd be running, boiling hot and battery almost depleted.

I never figured out what caused it, maybe it was something in the firmware. Or something bumping the power button? However it was in a padded laptop compartment on its own.This was actually from full-off. Not even standby.

What didn't help was that I used LUKS full disk encryption so it would be sitting there waiting for a password and there was no sleep timeout.

In the end I found the SP3 was just not great for Linux, I had so many hardware issues. Sometimes I'd detach the keyboard and reattach, and it'd just not work. Or the pen would stop working or the rotation etc. Mind you this is around the time it came out. So a good while ago.

I’d recommend just using a long term service channel version of Windows. It’s designed for embedded systems like MRIs so I doesn’t do any of the auto install and restart crap. Also doesn’t have the telemetry or most any other bloat ware Windows usually comes with.

I really like the form factor, but my Surface Pro 7 has really let me down lately. It’s about a year old now and fully patched, but the battery barely lasts 4 hours, camera is buggy (Windows Hello stops working), and randomly shuts down.

You can disable some of this by disabling the wake timers setting in your bios/UEFI menu.

I personally turned them on intentionally, as I mostly use my PC as a music/fine server these days; I configured most of my applications (bubbleupnp, nginx, airsonic, everything, etc) to start up either as system services on boot; the rest (WSL, fb2k, calibre) start up on login via schtasks, so if my they aren't working remotely I can just login via TeamViewer to log into my profile. Without this setup, my computer would _never_ get updates, as I don't sit down at it much anymore.

I used a dell inspiron laptop years ago. As its fan became broken, sometimes it could make noise that people can hear from miles away. And yes, it was scarying when Windows 10 auto reboot and updated at 3AM.

I've owned both a Microsoft Surface laptop and currently own an XPS 15. Both of them I have had the same thing happen where they are in "sleep" mode and have woken up. I'll have them in a bag and open them up and it's really cooking inside the laptop sleeve and the laptop and bag are quite warm. Honestly the amount of heat there I wouldn't be surprised if there have been fires from this kind of stuff.

Basically if I know I won't be using my laptop for a bit and am putting it in a bag I always make sure to turn it off now.

I've always had success with hibernate. Does this stuff bypass hibernate now too?

This is why I don’t use windows right here.

This really sounds like a hardware issue. I have had a Lenovo Carbon X1 for 3.5 years and have never had this issue with it.

Ah, must be why I've never had any issues with my xps running Linux.

Far be it for me to defend Microsoft here, but I feel like if you leave unsaved documents open overnight, you are asking for trouble. Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me.

This whole post is actually pretty confusing to me. I don't use Windows that frequently myself, but my work laptop, my wife's laptop, my child's laptop, and my Surface Pro 1 all have Windows 10 on them, and this sort of thing has never happened to me. But I do my updates in a timely manner, shut down my PCs regularly, and only use sleep for temporary moments when I'm away from my PC.

I just feel like a lot of the problems people have with Windows 10 aren't really in the software, but are between the keyboard and chair.

I have an XPS 9500 and have found this infuriating.

I think there's two separate things going on:

As others have noted, S3 sleep isn't supported, only S1 "sleep to idle" sleep. But I don't think this is the direct cause of the overheating. In S1 sleep, the laptop can average something like 900mW of power usage, which is enough to annoyingly knock a few percent off your battery overnight, but not enough to make the laptop warm, even in a bag.

The seems to be a second problem, specific to Windows, that when in S1 sleep sometimes the power consumption is high (of order 10W), and this causes the laptop to get very hot if not well ventilated. I've never been able to figure out if this Windows actually doing something useful in "modern standby" like Windows Update, or whether it's a bug. Edit: And I should add, it's crazy that there's not a way to disable this if it is doing something "useful".

Either way, under Linux the latter doesn't happen, and the laptop sleeps very cool ... just with the annoying "lose 5% of your battery overnight" problem from sleeping in S1.

There is something OS specific: Windows has some setting to wake up when a WLAN connection is available. I had this issue once, that I hibernated it, put it in a bag and went home. On the way it must have picked up some WLAN somewhere and have turned on, while in my bag, while the lid is closed, while hibernated ... And I believe this was the standard setting. I mean, who in their right mind wants their laptop to turn on, when the lid is even closed only, because they are in range of some WLAN? What a silly setting. This has probably fried many machines and also probably their owners still do not know, that Windows was the culprit, not their hardware. Fortunately my way home was not long at that time, so the overheating was avoided in time multiple times, until I figured out what was going on. Well, now I do not use Windows any longer, except rarely, so no such issues.

I have an XPS 9500 under Linux (this is a >$4000 machine), no amount of fiddling with BIOS settings (which are few) or systemd/GNOME settings will make it work reliably:

- short suspend time (it can't really stay overnight when suspended with a full battery)

- sometimes it wakes up and overheats in the bag

- very short battery duration when unplugged

Apparently I'm not alone, and even under Windows it's a generalized problem; and when you look for solution on Dell's forum you find this FAQ, which tend to say XPS are more foldable desktops than real laptops.

My wife had a similar problem with her XPS-15. Randomly during the night the laptop would warm up and cause the fans to spin up. Apparently this is caused by windows waking up. Initially I thought it was windows deciding to do an update, but even disabling that (if it is possible at all), the laptop would wakeup. Random trailing through the internet pointed to the useless Killer network drivers, or better the management application, to be the cause and uninstalling them was supposed to fix the issue. Anecdotally it seemed to have worked, but when I last checked the drivers seemed to be back.

> just with the annoying "lose 5% of your battery overnight" problem from sleeping in S1.

Just 5% would be manageable -- I probably wouldn't even notice it. It's more on the order or 20-30% for me, so if I happen to not use my laptop over the weekend, I'll come back to a completely dead laptop.

A couple times, I've opened the laptop to have it scream at me to plug it in ASAP.

It's frustrating when you put a completely charged laptop to bed and can't get going without having to hunt for a power cord.

I just can't understand how people put up with not being able to control what they primary machines are doing.

For that reason my primary work machine can currently only be Linux. I have Windows, but this one is only for stuff that is incompatible with Linux.

I actually have Linux PC and a separate Linux laptop (Thinkpad T440s).

That laptop runs super cool once I debugged all the sources of power usage. Which is quite easy on Linux but neigh impossible on Windows.

"Modern Standby" is such a crock of shit. As far as anyone knows, it doesn't do anything useful, but it consumes FIFTY PERCENT (50%!) of the battery each night.

Luckily you can turn it off, at least in Linux, and then the machine functions more-or-less normally.

See if cat /sys/power/mem_sleep returns [s2idle] deep

You want it to return [deep] s2idle

Adding something like, /etc/sysfs.d/set-sleep-to-s2ram.conf:

    power/mem_sleep=deep

(The above requires the package 'sysfsutils' to be installed on Debian / Debian derived distributions).

On my work supplied xps-13, bluetooth does not survive the laptop being unplugged in "deep" sleep (even for a couple seconds). Fixing bluetooth requires suspend to disk aka "hibernate" or regular reboot to restore. No reloading modules etc. helps. Other than that annoying bug, proper sleep works fine on the hardware.

But, I also had to add, /etc/modprobe.d/i915gpu-fix-xps13-crashes.conf:

    options i915 enable_guc_loading=1 enable_guc_submission=1

To solve the laptop crashing when idle. Originally I disabled c-states on the gpu to fix the crashing, but some other kind soul on the Internet shared the above which solves the crashing, but doesn't kill battery life like my fix.

I also have a 9500. I'm considering selling it, the hardware is just so buggy.

If I do I'll probably buy a framework laptop.

Serious question — why do people so frequently sleep rather than shut down? Is it to save time on booting up? Is it because you want other processes running? All of the pain points below are reasons why I just always shut down. I think I developed the habit at a time when sleep just never worked on my linux machine though, but that was years ago now. I’m speechless reading below that Windows wakes just to install updates… and then remains awake!

I've seen issues with Modern Standby on my fleet of Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga L13 and L13 Gen 2. Usually everything is fine, but sometimes they get super hot in standby as well. It's like something is keeping the CPU awake but the rest of the hardware is asleep (including the fans). My older units (ThinkPad Yoga 260, ThinkPad Yoga 370, ThinkPad L380 Yoga, ThinkPad L390 Yoga) never had any problem like this because they don't support Modern Standby.

It's very annoying that MS doesn't allow us any way to disable Modern Standby. OEMs still haven't figured out how to make old school sleep perfectly reliable. Springing a new standby model on them was doomed to be just troublesome.

It's something about modern standby. I have a laptop with a 10th Gen i7. I put it in my bag once and when I pulled it out after my trip, the fans were running at full blast and the laptop was extremely hot. I'm also fairly sure it damaged the fan because it's never been able to run at higher speeds ever since.

I'm also not sure if it's a bug or something else. I do feel like there's something problematic about modern standby. I didn't have this issue under Linux, which actually does standby properly.

You can force modern standby to disconnect from networks (connected standby vs. disconnected standby). This helps with stopping the system from waking up randomly.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/146593-enable-disable-ne...

Something seems a bit off with your numbers. If you're losing 5% of your battery "overnight" (at least 8 hours I assume), and you have the larger 86Wh battery, that implies a discharge rate of only 537mW.

900mw - nearly a whole watt - seems very high! Easily enough to cause noticeable warming - a running modern laptop at idle only uses 3-6 watts.

>I've never been able to figure out if this Windows actually doing something useful in "modern standby" like Windows Update, or whether it's a bug.

I asked a very similar question a few months ago. The sleep/standby modes were behaving as other people have reported, however, the fact that the battery was draining rapidly in shutdown mode, on a new Dell with a 3 month-old battery with very few cycles, was a cause for concern. Nevertheless, I tried using the CsEnabled trick, which didn't work. Eventually, after troubleshooting BIOS features, applying the latest updates and using powercfg options -- batteryreport, sleepstudy etc.

I found a solution, which is a compromise at best. The battery drain was 20% within a few hours. But now with S3 sleep state -- it drains around 8-10% in full shutdown mode over a period of 8-10 hours. A similar drain in Standby is over a period of 15-18 hours.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/h0r56s/getting_back_s...

I was going to post the exact same thing. I have the 9500; this definitely infuriated me and is mostly solved by installing Linux.

There are still some things that can annoyingly wake it (usually a bluetooth device trying to pair to it); but it's an odd exception versus the 50% chance every time I went to transport my laptop with Windows.

Ironically, the reason S3 is not available is because of Microsoft.

> All newer Dell laptops now use the Microsoft Modern Standby.

So let me guess: "modern" here is indicates a shitty new thing that doesn't work as well as the old thing.

...after further reading, yep:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...

> On occasion, the system stays in the active mode (with the screen off) for a longer interval of time. These longer active intervals occur for a variety of reasons, for example, processing incoming email or downloading critical Windows updates. Windows components that are allowed to leave the SoC in the active power state are called activators because they are registered with the power manager as capable of blocking the transition back to the idle power mode. The durations of these activities vary widely but are controlled to extend battery life. The durations of the activities can be viewed with the built-in SleepStudy software tool or through Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)-based instrumentation.

It's not just Microsoft's fault.

Intel have completely removed S3 sleep from the latest Tigerlake chips so even if you run Linux you end up with the same problem.

Lenovo is able to add it back as an option in the BIOS. This is the case for P14s Gen 2 and X1 Carbon Gen 9.

So let me guess: "modern" here is indicates a shitty new thing that doesn't work as well as the old thing.

Funny how the software industry has managed to turn the connotation of "modern" for me from "neutral/slightly positive" to "definite negative" in around a decade.

Sounds like government needs to step in if its a safety hazard

This truly an antifeature.

The issue is that Windows doesn't go into S3 sleep when you close the lid; it goes into a weird not-really-asleep state for... some reason that I don't agree with[0]. I guess that state is "hot" enough that you could damage the laptop by putting it in a bag while in that state.

Fortunately I've been running Linux on my XPS 13, which I have put into a bag hundreds of times (maybe even over a thousand) while suspended. Linux's suspend does actually use the "cold" S3 suspend state, so this is safe.

[0] It's called "Modern Standby" (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...), which... honestly sounds really stupid to me. "Modern Standby" presumably drains the battery orders of magnitude faster than a normal S3 standby. I can't imagine ever wanting this behavior. I'm entirely fine with my laptop taking ~10 seconds to wake up and reconnect to whatever network I'm near.

Oh wow. i did NOT know that. Even worse...

>Switching between S3 and Modern Standby cannot be done by changing a setting in the BIOS. Switching the power model is not supported in Windows without a complete OS re-install.

and on Reddit

>Warning: if your laptop is newer than 2019, there is a high chance, your OEM removed any S3 code from the bios, and your laptop will crash entering S3 and you have to force hold power key to restart and then delete the registry entry again to revert back to modern standby.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/h0r56s/getting_back_s...

so not only is microsoft screwing around.. its getting all the manufacturers to screw around as well?

I have dell XPS, it had perfectly functional sleep and could be put in a bag. Then 'modern standby' was added in an update and it ruine the laptop - if I place it in the bag in the morning, by linchtime it will be crazy hot and the battery will be gone. And you cannot diaable this feature. I don't get wtf these people are smoking.

I purchased one of those 1st gen Windows on ARM laptops (HP Envy) specifically for the "instant on" / modern standby feature. It worked perfectly, just like a smartphone, until I received a major Windows update. Now it wakes slowly ruining the only good thing about that device. I've now been burned twice in a row by MS and will likely not purchase another product from them again.

The very latest (9310) XPS 13 doesn't have S3 at all, though, from what I'm gathering. So even on Linux, it won't sleep well.

> "some reason that I don't agree with[0]"

On my side I am quite happy that the hardware+software can support some kind of fast wake-up (similar to Macbooks and smartphones instead of needing >10 seconds to wake up when I open the lid). I just do a real shutdown when I don't need the laptop anymore.

And precisely : as it was said by someone else above, on modern computers with SSDs, I would rather disable "fast startup" so that the computer really shutdowns when I ask him to (which is also useful when you have dual-boot and your Linux systems wants to get r/w access to the NTFS partition)

But I admit that the computer could/should automatically enter in suspend-to-disk after being in "modern standby" for more than e.g. 5 minutes, and this should be configurable.

In case anyone is curious I wrote up how I use suspend (amongst other things) with my XPS 13 running Debian: http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/how-i-use-debian-dell-xps-13...

On the other hand ssh sessions staying opened are nice. I agree it doesn't outweigh the mess it created though

Just wait. The newer laptops don't have S3 in the bios at all.

I own XPS 13 9380 with Windows 10. Same mess with the sleep. I have to carry the laptop in the bag when commuting. You never know what it is doing when lid is closed. There is no lights on the laptop to indicate its state so I just usually put it to my ear and listen until the fan goes off after closing the lid. Then it is semi safe to put it into the bag. Feels like stone age.

Things are just getting worse with Windows and those standard PCs. I never understood why they moved to that S1 idle when S3 was fulfilling basic needs. This family Intel+Windows starts to irritate me. I am seriously considering either fully moving to Linux or to Apple Silicon and Mac OS.

Writing this from my 2019 XPS 15 7590 i9 with (extended) 64 GB RAM. The OLED display quality is still the best any laptop can offer, but that's where it ends. Had countless issues with sleep, reboots after being "killed in sleep" for going over Windows sleep "battery drain limit" (can be increased in registry but hey), wifi/bt issues after wake-up, short battery endurance, fan noise (mitigated by undervolting w/ ThrottleStop). (In case I may sound too dramatic, check their forums: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/bd-p/XPS)

Then there's the classic Windows Laptop "goodness" like bad keyboards, bad trackpad (too much scrolling, jagged scrolling, bad trackpad surface), necessity to emulate Linux/Git/Wsl/Cygwin for any real dev work, having elaborate install.txt procedures for setting up a new laptop.

I wanted to have a "beefy" machine but since I can now do my play things on Google Colab (and my work on company's Macbook), I just ordered the last year's M1 Macbook Air and I'm done with this Dante's Inferno of Windows Laptop ecosystem. Windows 11 just reinforced my disbelief that Microsoft can produce usable operating system before our civilization reaches Singularity.

I absolutely agree that microsoft could and should make this work better. But the pragmatic workaround is the setting to force hibernation when you close the lid. You can resume from SSD in 10 seconds. No middle of the night wakeups. Much improved battery life.

Recently bought a 7390 latitude (2-3 years old). amazing machine for basic remote desktop and basic office work etc. Battery lasts 10+ hrs on light work.

Had the sleep states turned on and would randomly die at 60% battery while sleeping. Found out its a long standing bug in dells. Sometimes it just restarts the machine so if its in a bag it will just keep running.

Turned of sleep states in firmware and instead now it goes to hibernate on sleep. No random behavior or shutdown.

Its mind boggling this shit used to work totally fine on older laptops, no idea what changed.

Same with Linux honestly. I suspended a Linux laptop, shoved it in the bag, got on the train, little did I know that it didn't actually go into suspend.

Like WTF, if the lid is closed, the hardware should force it to suspend, not get stuck in some software. If the software doesn't respond in time then force the damn thing off.

It heated up like mad, even too hot to touch. Was worried about the possibility of a Lithium battery explosion. If that happened who do you sue, Canonical or the laptop manufacturer?

FYI, these computers may lack proper firmware support to deep sleep on Linux as well, and will use s2idle sleep.

I believe ARM Macs use the same type of sleep, only with more polished firmware and better vertical integration with the OS.

I got a new laptop earlier this year and I was eyeing this exact one. I was going to wipe out windows and put linux on it(as is tradition with me) but I ended up settling for an Asus once again. It seems like you can get a lot more bang for the buck with Asus in Europe. Can't say it has been an entirely smooth ride for one or two reasons(running a patched kernel driver for the screen backlight) but after reading your comment, I am glad I made that call.

> listen until the fan goes off after closing the lid

I knew I wasn't the only one who does it!

I had a dell laptop around 2012 that had this same problem, on Windows 7. I also remember holding it up to my ear to confirm it shut down haha. And it did wake itself up and overheat in my bag a couple times. I've just avoided Dell ever since when I can. My current work laptop is some sort of Dell XPS, but at least I didn't pay for it.

Im currently in the process of getting a framework laptop setup using arch+wayland+sway and I'm not convinced it's any better on this side. Something as simple as a screensaver requires xwayland which is frustrating.

FWIW my (Intel) MacBook does the same. Sometimes it just doesn't go to sleep when I close the lid and it's not clear why, so I have to listen for the fans. So dumb.

My sample size is 1, but so far I am not impressed that my wife's M1 MBP didn't last more than 4 months before needing a full mainboard replacement. She's not a power-user and I would expect a "pro" laptop to be more resilient than this (even in the exceptional cases).

I can recommend the M1 air which has surprised me the other direction in hardly using any battery while sleeping. The prior Intel macbook used a lot more.

> With regards to transporting your laptop, you must first turn the laptop OFF

This has been a problem for already quite long. I remember my very old laptop overheating if being put in the backpack in Standby mode.

Nowadays I in fact don't just turn laptops Off the default way. I go and disable the "fast start up" (Control Panel - Power Options - Choose what the power buttons do) to make sure the computer gets turnt of for real rather than using yet another flavour of hibernation. And it still starts very fast (a couple of seconds longer perhaps) so I see no reason for these "fast start up" and "modern stand-by" modes to even exist now as we have fast SSDs and everything.

Besides starting up fast, another important value standby modes add is freeing you from having to open, position and initialize (open the documents/locations in them) all your apps manually every time. But this seems trivial to be reached by adding functions to just save the list of opened apps, their windows positions and the actual documents which were opened in them. This will require some coordinated effort from both the OS and the apps developers though.

This is so infuriating, because this problem has already been solved once. It's called "Hibernation", and was added in Windows 95. This should write your MEM image to disk, power the laptop completely off and allow later restoring where you left when powering your laptop back on. But laptop manufacturers (including Apple) thought it somehow smart to remove true hibernation, and replace it with some botched "deep sleep" that is not actually working, as it does not actually turn the computer OFF. This is SO infuriating - who thought it smart to REGRESS on a solution that has worked so well for DECADES?

> laptop overheating if being put in the backpack

I killed a macbook air exactly like this. It just decided not to shutdown like usual.

Usually I'd put it on sleep mode, or just close the lid and it is fine, but it only took one time for it not to work properly to find the insides of my backpack like a sauna.

Your last point is why I use hibernate. The actual boot time is barely noticeable on new laptops but even if I remember what I was doing when I hibernated it, which is rare, it still takes a while to get all my terminal windows back and everything where it was.

Wait, Windows still doesn't do that?

> Besides starting up fast, another important value standby modes add is freeing you from having to open, position and initialize (open the documents/locations in them) all your apps manually every time. But this seems trivial to be reached by adding functions to just save the list of opened apps, their windows positions and the actual documents which were opened in them. This will require some coordinated effort from both the OS and the apps developers though.

I just gave up on OS and app developers and implemented a half-assed solution myself using scripts. It works mainly because my setup is fairly fixed so I just fire everything up and fix any differences manually if needed.

Can confirm, this was an issue ten years ago and I can't understand why it still is a problem.

Mind you, I've had it with an older model Macbook as well, wouldn't go to sleep properly when closed / off of power / in a bag.

Wow, it's quite fascinating what you non-Mac people are willing to put up with. Or maybe it's fascinating how Mac JustWorks(TM).

This is one of the main reasons I just returned my XPS 13 9310 and got a Framework instead. The sleep/standby/hibernate stuff is just bad. I don’t know if it is a Dell problem or a Windows problem or what, but it’s terrible.

I’m primarily a Mac user but I haven’t had the same issue with other Windows laptops and the Dell has standby issues in Linux too so it’s just bad. And loud. And hot.

Yup, I bought that same model (to run Linux) on a long time reputation for Dell XPS on Linux and the power management is ridiculous. Absolutely terrible. Unplugged, mine won't hold a charge for more than a day unless it's shut all the way down. It loses something like 5% of battery power an hour. A buddy has one that's previous gen and it actually sleeps correctly.

It's an Intel problem.

They just axed S3 sleep in the latest Tigerlake chips (which the 9310 use, and I assume Framework is using or will use in the future). You can't even workaround this by running Linux.

This more or less means that there isn't actually an alternative to modern standby other than hibernation at the hardware level any more (unless AMD continue to support it which there's a good chance of happening).

I'm on Arch, and it gets hot in my bag when in sleep mode. Hibernate is certainly good though, since it's basically powered off, but I haven't tested because in my experience hibernation on Linux is kinda finicky to get to work flawlessly

It's definitely a Windows issue. I've had it with non-XPS Dells and completely different brands like Eluktronics.

Most of my Windows laptops in the past would do this in a bag (e.g., Sony and Razor). I'd pin it on Windows, not saying it happens to all Windows laptops but Windows allows it to happen. It knows to sleep when shut, but somehow spins back up in the bag.

This is about the tenth time I’ve seen someone reference a framework laptop in the last couple of days.

Is it a new company?

This always happened with my Surface Book, a flagship Microsoft made device. I could never trust it in my backpack. WTF msft.

OK, so, overheating the laptop stresses it and will eventually damage it. Got it. Easy to understand.

Question. What is it about "being in a bag" that destroys the thermal handling? I've had my laptop in my lap spontaneously power off when it gets too hot. (Which itself makes me a bit crabby about why it didn't successfully throttle down until it could at least keep running, but that's a separate gripe.) Why doesn't the laptop in the bag also eventually turn itself off?

Laptops are equipped with thermal sensors to prevent themselves from destroying themselves already. Why aren't they working here? Why don't the sensors cut things off earlier? Why isn't this a warranty issue? Isn't my hardware's thermal shutoff mechanism defective if it lets this happen?

Thermal sensors measure temperature in specific points / small areas. There are a finite number of these and they do not cover the entire CPU / GPU / motherboard / etc.

If one puts a massive load on a CPU, the temperature spikes quickly and widely across enough of the die that the sensors work as expected and the system throttles / shuts down.

If one puts a small load on the CPU for a long period of time, areas that are not covered by sensors may overheat, damaging the CPU. This is true for other components in the system, too.

If the laptop is out in the air, convection will remove enough heat to prevent these invisible "hot spots". The bag acts as a blanket. Over hours, the laptop cooks parts of itself to death[0] in ways the system cannot detect.

[0] Or damages them in ways that make them unstable.

Edited to add [0]

I had a Dell XPS 9310 until about 3 months ago when suddenly one of the fans died on me for no obvious reasons while I was in quarantine. Given that the fans are now soldered onto the mainboard, Dell was offering me to repair this for almost the same amount I paid for the whole laptop 2 years earlier. Needless to say that this was the last time I will buy a Dell.

Since I am located in Asia, I also went to one of the unauthorized repair shops to see if they could offer a cheaper way to get this done. When I walked in, I saw two customers in front of me with Dells. When it was my turn, I also asked which laptop brands are having the most and least issues. Not surprisingly, Lenovo and Dell rank very high. The Taiwanese (Asus, Acer) as well as Razer and hp were considered of higher quality.

Apple as well. I have a 2018 15" Macbook Pro with problems:

  - The battery is dying
  - The touchbar flickers whenever it is 'off' - a hardware fault that requires the full top case to replaced[1] - Quotes of $400-1200.

And things that aren't technically problems but still have the same, can't do anything about it stuck with the problem vibe:

  - I keep running out of space, but it's soldered to the logic board 
  - Keyboard is one of those shitty butterfly keyboards
  - It's always heat throttling

Granted, I might be able to get some of them fixed, but not without major inconvenience of being without my laptop for some period of time.

I've used Macs since the Apple Mac IIx, but I really hate the can't fix your own computer thing that has taken over in the last few years, for both Apple and others.

If Framework[2] offered a 15" or 17" version, I would be there in a heartbeat, but the 13" is just too small considering I don't use an external monitor.

[1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2017-mbp-touchbar-flash... [2]: https://frame.work

You have to weight brands with the most issues vs market dominance vs likelihood of being seen by someone who observes the problem.

If most laptops are Dells, then most problems will be on Dell machines, even if a niche brand is lower reliability.

If most Apple laptops are taken to an Apple store, then a PC laptop repair shop won't see problems with Apple laptops.

And so on.

Anecdotally, I know three people including myself who’ve had ASUS machines die on them right out of warranty protection, and I do not recommend them at all.

I'm trying to think back to when Dell made a 'good' laptop. Maybe the D630? Lenovo was still better, but what Dell sells now is just terrible.

I will never buy a Dell XPS laptop again. The exterior build quality seems very good, but the internals are such a mess.

I cannot count how many times I have been biking home from work and heard in my headphones "Two devices connected", realizing that my Dell XPS had woken up and would - once again - be red hot when I arrived home and pulled it out of my bag.

Just curious, why would you keep putting the standby laptop in your backpack after this had occurred more than once? It sounds like hardware russian roulette.

Same experience. I can't understand how a company like Dell isn't capable of avoiding such design mistakes with their laptop line.

I've had three generations of the XPS 13. The first I had had a few issues, but fixable. (Even though I agree, this shouldn't even have occurred) The second one was flawless. The last one was worse than the first and it's my last.

I've set my sights on Lenovo now. X1 Carbon is supposed to be really good for Linux and you can buy it with Ubuntu or no OS installed.

I bike to work with a dell xps 9343 and don't have any more problems with it waking from sleep unexpectedly. powercfg -lastwake and powercfg -waketimers can show what is causing the computer to wake up, and you can disable some of the modern standby settings like wake words with cortana or bluetooth. The same thing can happen with any other laptop, the default intel/microsoft settings leave a lot of possibilities and I have run into a similar issue with an X1 and a t580.

This is unrelated, but do you find that you lose your sense of awareness when cycling with headphones in? I can see the appeal in a rural road or otherwise less busy area, but in downtown Toronto, you'll die if you do it.

Even on country roads, occasionally cars (and cyclists!) will pass to close, and one errant swerve will end in disaster.

I forget which country it was, but they had a national campaign (including radio ads and one pop song) that encouraged cyclists to ride with only one earbud inserted.

This is not exclusive to Dell.

Many laptop makers started to intentionally disable S3 for the "enhanced" S2. This was/is true of Lenovo as well: for roughly 6 months S3 was disabled completely on the then-new 3rd generation Yoga X1 laptops and Carbon counterparts. It was re-enabled thanks to linux user's uproar under the "legacy sleep mode" umbrella.

Why would you go as far as disabling it, is beyond me. S3 is the sleep mode I expect on a laptop. S2 sounds useful for tablet/phone behavior.

Hibernation doesn't of course suffer from this issue, and I never experienced this on any laptop with S3 sleep.

Of course, if you shut down your laptop and put it immediately in a bag, temperature will raise temporarily even if the system is off due to the inability to dissipate heat. You should be aware of this, and avoid immediately bagging the laptop just after rebuilding the kernel ;)

It's not like the laptop generates any heat once you turn it off. It's more like its not vented out and is absorbed by other components that normally do not get warm. The total heat is not any greater.

Clickbaity title. It says

> Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The PC will overheat as a result of that action. Any resulting damage will not be covered by the Dell warranty.

Now how a hibernated laptop could overheat..

I leave my MacBook’s lid closed for a week and I can open it to maybe 5% battery drain.

The article should explicitly state…

> Under no circumstances should you leave a Windows laptop in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag

…because other, more competent, manufacturers have figured this out. Windows and their OEMs simply suck, there is no sugarcoating it.

Submitted title was "Putting a DELL XPS laptop in a bag voids its warranty". We've changed it to a shortened version of what you quoted. Thanks!

The page has been edited and no longer mentions warranty at all.

My 2017 MBP that was fully spec’d out is both the most expensive and worst laptop I’ve ever owned.

-Rarely ever goes to sleep

-It’s the same model Facebook returned a few thousand of because it randomly voltage surges the USB-C ports and fries stuff plugged into it. Apple refuses to acknowledge this, even though a bad voltage surge blew out the left speaker.

-Keyboards been replaced four times

-NVRAM needs to be reset weekly

-Charging it is super fun. If it still has a charge, you get to randomly pick a USB-C port to plug the charger in. If it’s not that one, power cycle the charger for 30 seconds and try a new port

-Given it never goes to sleep and has no charging indicator, when it’s dead (most of the time I open it) you get to play the charging port roulette, except you have to keep it plugged in a few minutes to see if it gets a charge, before power cycling the charging brick.

-A small half circle of glass popped out of the bottom of the display, where it meets the hinge when it was running an intense CPU load

I'm missing the relevance here? Are you just trying to point out that MacBooks are also imperfect?

I had a 2017 as well. And before that a 2013. And since then a 2019 16-inch and a 2020 M1. Yes, the 2017 sucked balls in ways that I can't even begin to count. The 2013 was f*cking flawless. I've similarly had almost zero problems with the 2019 16-inch MBP or my 2020 M1. There's just something especially crappy about the 2017s, and I doubt you'd find many people who'd seriously disagree about that.

Have we really evolved to the state that laptop portability is an extra feature and not part of the design criteria for the modern laptop? That the sleep capability of laptops, present in various forms since the 90s, should no longer be used even though it's the default when the lid is closed?

I've been a fan of Dell for many years, against so much evidence of what a joke they've become, but this issue may finally tip me over the edge.

Any name brand PCs you trust to buy for family members who want a name brand and the perceived value that provides? (Besides Apple, I guess).

> Any name brand PCs you trust to buy for family members who want a name brand and the perceived value that provides? (Besides Apple, I guess).

It feels like you might've answered your own question. For better or worse, most of this kind of stuff "just works" in the Apple ecosystem.

Oh, come on, sleep and hibernation are the "shut down" of a laptop nowadays, you close the lid and shove it into the bag. Its just as absurd as saying you cant put the phone in your pocket unless you fully turn it off.

You’re not really supposed to bring a phone that close to your skin, otherwise you might exceed safe radiation levels.

Microsoft has a serious issue with thinking it's ok to wake up from sleep mode. I added a script to the task scheduler to resleep if woken up by anything other than the power button[1]. In retrospect, the wake ups were either to perform updates or some kind of bug related to transitioning to hibernation which ends up with the pc idling on[2]. Both of which would result in the classic hot bag / dead battery situation.

[1] https://github.com/KarlTheCool/NeverWake

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/gpdwin/comments/iqmdeo/windows_kept...

If the laptop cannot be carried with the sleep/hibernate/standby, then it does not have a functioning sleep/hibernate/standby and is not fit for use as a laptop, so it was sold as defective and should be replaced with a working laptop at the manufacturer's expense.

Not really in practice though - to rephrase, you can only put it in a bag if it's shut down - how many people do that frequently other than to reboot for some reason? How many of those do it every time they put it in a bag? As if on your commute to work for example you're going to power on when you get on the train, shut down again when you get off, power on again when you get into the office, off again when you leave, ... (and if the job involves lots of client meetings, or presentations in another building..!)

Note, this isn't Dell specific - the loss of s3 sleep is coming from Intel and Microsoft. The idea is that S0ix is supposed to "replace" s3, but (at least on Linux) it's a horrible mess.

I have a System76/Clevo - ostensibly one of the better choices for running Linux - and S0ix at best drains like ~5% of my battery overnight, and at worst it doesn't work at all.

Some will quip that I shouldn't expect sleep to work on Linux anyway, but this defies my experience with S3 on Linux (which has "just worked" for the last decade for me) so this is a substantial downgrade.

Do yourself a favor and avoid Tiger Lake and newer if you care about reliable sleep.

Just got a i5-1135g7 system can't make ubuntu to wake up my screen. seems like it won't be fixed. and windows s3 wake is just very slow, need 5-8s to wake.

I've had this happen to me once with an XPS13-9360.

I use Linux on my laptops exclusively, and it was supposed to enter S3 just fine. But after I closed the lid, something went wrong, and instead of suspending it actually started hogging 100% of CPU. I was unaware of it, and put it into my backpack. Shortly after, I had noticed that my back felt unusually warm. When I got it out, it was infuriatingly hot, almost scalding. I kept pressing down the power button until it turned off, and held it in the open air until both it and the inside of my backpack cooled off enough. Thankfully, it was a cold winter evening, so it didn't take very long.

It's been 3 years now, the laptop works to this day nicely, even after suffering a bent edge on the screen assembly after falling down.

There's a whole bunch of reasons I keep disabling modern standby on my laptop. (And that's 'keep disabling' because either Dell or Microsoft keep switching it back on after updates - note this is a Windows feature, not a Dell-specific thing).

[Edit: In addition, the reg key to disable it keeps changing from release to release...]

The two most annoying ones:

1 - while in the middle of a VoIP call via a wireless headset, lock laptop while walking away from desk to make a cup of tea in the next room, 30 seconds later laptop goes into 'standby', cutting off the call...

2 - WiFi never wakes back up properly out of modern standby, either disable/re-enable, or disconnect/reconnect works to bring it back perfectly ok.

Dell sells official Dell laptop bags, backpacks, and cases: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/carrying-cases/ac/7301

"Keep your laptop, tablet and everyday essentials protected with sleek backpacks designed to blend in to any environment."

I suspect that a lawsuit against their denial of warranty for putting a laptop into a backpack would go pretty well.

It's not that you can't put it in a bag, you just need to shutdown the laptop completely before doing so.

The issue is most people don't use their laptops like that. My laptop basically only shuts down doing updates. While I can sort of understand Dells logic, it's also ignoring how people will normally use their laptops. It's really something Dell should adresse in their coming generations of laptops. No amount of writing will get users to change their behavior and even if Dell is correct, it will make their laptops seem inferior if they break because you transportet them in a bag while hibernating.

"Modern Standby"

Good language example here: "Modern" is nearly always an advocacy word. Literally it just means "up to date", but in fact it is almost always used in the sense of "this should be the successor of what you currently have, you should feel bad about what I designate as outdated". Sometimes this is justifiable, but...

The entire fucking point in a laptop is to be portable. If you _have_ to shut it down completely before putting it in a bag, it’s not a laptop as any sane person expects it to have that ability.

It’s absolutely astonishing that Dell, Microsoft and friends leave walk over in the laptop industry like this. “Oh we decided users don’t really want to be able to close the lid and go home.” ??????

Not going to lie but Apple have put pretty high standards on what people expect to work with all laptops nowadays, and many OEMs seem unable or unwilling to try to catch up.

Next thing you know, they'll be telling you that you can't use the device on top of your lap...

Reminds me of the push a while back to rebrand laptops as "notebooks" - because many laptops (esp Dell XPS) are not built with a strong enough backbone to keep their own weight from sagging in the middle, and because they get hot enough to cause damage to legs.

I have had an XPS since 2017, it had everything I wanted (I thought) - but I seriously regretted the decision almost immediately. High-intensity tasks (gaming, TDD, etc) would cause it to conk out from overheating because they hadn't configured the bios correctly - spent hours with various levels of Dell support trying to get it fixed, with them installing various combinations of different versions of the bios firmware. The GPU setup wasn't quite as straightforward as it could have been (which isn't really Dell's problem I guess - if I was running windows, it might not have been a problem at all)

Nowadays, the base of the laptop has bowed, causing the trackpad to unglue and jut out at an angle. I have a massive mark on my screen where I once tried to shut my laptop normally - I still have to take it places, and to do that I sandwich a piece of polystyrene in it to protect the screen. I hope this is warped due to heat and not the battery bowing, but I'm burying my head in the sand on that one. And yes, I have to shut it down every time I transport it.

Thankfully, once I have the funds available, I know what laptop I'm getting next. And it won't be a dell.

> Nowadays, the base of the laptop has bowed, causing the trackpad to unglue and jut out at an angle.

I don't think that's coming from the laptop sagging. They're pretty rigid. I think your battery has swollen.

But fret not, it's "factory-replaceable".

There's another modern trend with what appears to be no justification.

I had the exact same issue (base of the laptop bowing because the battery is swollen, the trackpad was almost coming out) : it's actually pretty straightforward to replace the battery yourself.

Unscrew something like 8 standard screw, replace the battery, rescrew.

If you don't have any tools at home and are not sure what battery to buy : https://eustore.ifixit.com/products/dell-xps-15-9550-and-551...

> the push a while back to rebrand laptops as "notebooks" - because many laptops (esp Dell XPS) are not built with a strong enough backbone to keep their own weight from sagging in the middle, and because they get hot enough to cause damage to legs.

This wasn't a rebranding, it was a category of laptop. Cheap, small, and light, designed for people who intended to offload many local functions to the cloud. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

Faded away as a term once this became the default thing to do.

Dells were the only laptops I ever encountered that you could bend. It’s amazing anyone other then starving college kids ever used them.

> I know what laptop I'm getting next. And it won't be a dell.

Tell me about these greener pastures!

XPS should be "developer laptops". They even come with Linux. So I tried two.

Never experienced a more faulty keyboard on a computer in my life. Hanging keys, firmware updates that never really fixed the problem, support forums full of same questions. I'll never buy one again.

Too bad as I wanted to support "big brand w/ Linux preinstalled".

“ I wanted to support "big brand w/ Linux preinstalled"”

Look at Lenovo maybe :)

Hanging keys... I had that issue when I bought my last XPS secondhand. A tech came out and replaced the keyboard, and that was that.

Imagine if we had the technology to, when a laptop was in a hibernated or off state to use some sort of a mechanism to physically disconnect the battery. I know this is absolutely crazy but it seems to me that this would solve these problems in a foolproof way that wouldn't lead to the situation where your mission critical piece of equipment has killed it's battery, or itself entirely because it decided to do something you didn't want. Imagine a physical device capable of making and unmaking an electrical connection based on the angle or position of a physical component that is then unable to be superseded by bad programming. Imagine.

10-14 years ago my Dell laptops had removable battery. I did not use it to ensure anything (hibernation worked perfectly for me these days), but I would carry with me a spare fully-charged battery. Two batteries usually were enough for a cross-Atlantic trip, which was a frequent feature of my life.

I think this is a good idea. Like a physical disconnect for camera and mics. At some level, I just don’t trust software, especially nothing as complex as an OS, to do the right thing 100% of the time.

Although frankly I’ve never had issues like this with a Mac. I’ve never taken a mac out of a bag and had the battery dead or laptop hot.

Perhaps a device with a movable metal plate that disconnects a wire.. we could call it an 'Off Switch'

According to archive.org[0], looks like just now has Dell removed the red highlighted part that mentions the warranty. When I looked at the page earlier today, it was still there.

``` Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. ```

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210624044948/https://www.dell....

Years ago (~2010) I learned that companies sell laptops which can't cool themselves properly. I had an Acer "gaming laptop," which from the factory had fans which didn't sufficiently cool the CPU. After about 2 years of normal use, it cooked its thermal paste, and would shut off under even moderate use / stress.

This is obviously a different situation than what's occurring with Dell laptops, but it's not too far afield. When I bought the Acer, I never even considered reading up on cooling. I figured I'd only have to understand cooling if I built a computer myself: surely one from a manufacturer would already be able to cool itself sufficiently. Well, it turned out I was wrong. Keeping laptops cool is actually a pretty tough engineering problem, and too many companies and consumers aren't will to pay the price (either in higher dollar amount, or constrained capabilities) to ensure that this a standard.

Reminds me of the issue I remember with old Dell gaming laptops where the cups just had an insane amount of thermal paste on them so they always ran way hotter than they should.

You really can't trust the manufacturer to know what they're doing, especially if the potential problem is unlikely to be covered under warranty.

Doesn't seem to be much better for desktops: my wife just bought a Dell PC for gaming, and we have to replace the cpu cooler and case fan because what was supplied was clearly inadequate. Just because Dell wanted to shave a couple bucks off the manufacturing cost.

So if I understand it correctly, you have to manually shut down these laptops if you want to travel/commute with them and reboot them again when you want to use them, and they call that "MODERN" standby? And not even an option to change it?

Are they planning to keep that obviously broken behavior as the forum post seems to imply, or they will fix it?

The thing is, XPS laptop have issues going to S3 Sleep/Modern Standby. There are many threads about battery draining due to this.

The question is, why isn't the laptop shutting down properly when it begins to overheat inside a bag? In any case, this will probably not void the warranty in most countries.

Windows wakes up the computer all the fucking time, and this is the reason why they don't take responsibility. Frankly it's not just dangerous, as noted in the faq, but very creepy as well: it feels like someone tampered with it, because it's not in the state you left it in. I wish they weren't so successful with all their bullshit.

It happened fairly regularly that in the middle of the night I'd hear the windows notification chime, because my wife's desktop decided to wake up and do things.

I've had hibernated laptops wake up for whatever reasons in bags before. They get super-hot and shut down.

Come to think of it, they were Dells. Perhaps some switch is not properly debounced or something.

I once investigated why a PC occasionally turned on all by itself and at first suspected that something on the network might be sending wake on LAN packets. It turned out that the PC was only in sleep mode and not hibernating and that Windows can wake it up from there, e.g. because of scheduled maintenance. What was even more surprising, it will go back to sleep once it is done.

You might want to check the event viewer in cases like that.

This explains why my old windows laptop is constantly out of juice whenever I need to do something with Windows, even though I was sure I set it to hibernate.

The last time I turned it of, I removed the battery. It is pretty silly that my laptop in 2021 can't do what my first laptop could do in 2003. Even worse, it is a Thinkpad. I expect better from those.

The Surface Pro 4 had that problem for months after its release. https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/4hnhuz/just_took_m...

Had similar issues. Has something to do with wake timers (see powercfg /waketimers)

Sometimes caused by drivers or periphery. Good luck disabling them all.

No idea how modern sleep plays into this. The Linux hibernate turns the system off for real (battery can be removed).

My XPS 9560 has woken up from sleep randomly more times than I can count. It's sometimes happened in my backpack and always gets stupid hot. There is a definite issue here.

It was frustrating how my Dell XPS Laptop would frequently wake up in the laptop bag. When I open the bag, the laptop was near smoking hot. I fixed it by disabling Modern Standby but a Microsoft update killed that registry hack and I was forced to fully shut down the laptop.

Then my work Dell Precision 5530 started doing the same thing and I'm forced to shut it down. The problem was that particular laptop took several minutes to boot due to a slow BIOS post and corporate bloatware.

I always feel like laptops have actually started to degrade in the last decade. Maybe it's consumerism, but fairly often I get the idea they just assume after two or three years their products will fail.

I can personally vouch for Acer though, while I haven't purchased one of their laptops recently, when I was younger I had one I just abused the hell out of and it still worked fine.

It's very fun to make your stuff last longer

This is humorous timing for me. I just purchased an XPS 9510 and sleep mode was busted out of the box. After multiple hours of troubleshooting and updating bios and firmware with their "premium" support team, the machine still didn't work. I returned the laptop and vowed to never purchase a dell product ever again. They seem to have serious quality control issues in their product pipelines.

This is more of a Windows problem than a Dell problem. Windows seems to be terrible at going to sleep and staying asleep.

My current and previous Windows laptops (neither were from Dell) are/were set to sleep for 15 minutes and then hibernate when I have the lid closed, because otherwise they would randomly wake up, deplete the battery, generate lots of heat, and sometimes wake me up in the middle of the night.

I've also had desktop PCs with Windows that just refused to go to / stay asleep for various reasons including windows updates (that still hadn't completed a week later) and a documentation website that had a small silent video on loop (like an animated gif.)

My 2019 MacBook is better about this; once it goes to sleep, it seems to stay asleep. But it's still not perfect - I hit an issue where the iOS simulator and/or the Android emulator caused it to stay awake with the lid shut and drain my battery. So now I do kill those before closing the lid. But it does feel safe to put in a bag once it's actually asleep.

Dell used to have the option to disable "modern sleep" which is the root cause of all these problems. Dell in a later firmware update disabled the ability for end users to "fix" the problem on their end. This was about three years ago for the 9570 XPS model, they have not reverted this user-hostile action to my knowledge.

I still have my 9570 for gaming, just because I don't have the time to focus on replacing my windows laptop, but that's certainly the Last dell I plan on buying, I deal with laptop users regularly and this is one of the most common dell-specific complaints I hear/see.

Incredible. I have a Dell laptop and luckily I haven't had any catastrophes but I have seen it woken up a couple of times when it was just sitting there with its lid closed and nothing attached.

Putting your Laptop in a Back in sleep mode is a normal common usage for a laptop.

Hence I'm pretty sure that at least in Germany voiding warranty because of it is not legal.

I find this feature(tm) infuriating. It's one of the first things I disable when I format the laptop.

The battery drain for me much more significant, on the order of 30% per day. Oftentimes I would open my laptop after a day or two and it would be at a critical level if not outright dead.

I kept forgetting exactly how to fix it, since finding the right sites online required quite the exact combination of black magic keywords (since it's much easier to find articles sleep vs hibernation). Until today, actually, I had not been aware of the term "modern suspend".

I use Linux, so here's how to disable modern suspend: https://devnull.land/laptop-s2idle-to-deep

I have a dell 9700 and I had this happen just yesterday on a god damn flight. I am still pissed. I never put my laptop to sleep/hibernate. I always shutdown. I have no idea but it somehow turned on in my bag, I felt it on my leg on the flight. I opened the bag and it was freaking hot. I have no idea how this happened. I noticed sometimes when I docked I click shutdown, it doesn't shutdown.

The other thing is there is no freaking light on the laptop other than the keyboard lighting to indicate it's off. I have to flip the laptop and listen to see if it's on, I look like a crazy person in public. I love the laptop but this is downright ridiculous. As I am typing on it, I smell an electronic burn but the laptop seems fine.

I worked as a consultant for a while, and we needed light fast laptops. My boss once told me that he would blanket his laptop in order to have it fail so he could request a new model. Dell voiding warranties for someone who would do that is perfectly understandable.

I have had some sort of problem with battery discharging on my MBP after shutting down fully from Windows. I can't use sleep/hibernate on Windows at all because it crashes upon restarting, with a kernel panic that is reported to Apple next time I start MacOS. That seems to have to do with initiating the Touch Bar. Things are fine when sleeping or shutting down from MacOS, but three times now I have shutdown from Windows and disconnected from power, then the battery is almost fully discharged (1-2%) when I turn on the computer less than 24 hours later. I don't understand what might be happening while it is fully shutdown.

I really wonder what still drives people to Dell? Their products looks marvelous on the tech sheet, and that's also where the marvel ends. In my current career I've yet to touch a Dell laptop that doesn't try to melt itself by simply turning on, or fails to respond to touching the power button. It's as if the operation of the Power Button is a schrodinger cat.

Any corporation that is operating exclusively on Dell I deem to regard as a cost mitigation corporation that does not have their developers at their first place. I believe that no sane developer will opt for Dell's products, but rather go with Lenovo or Apple.

I've had several Dell devices, both laptops and desktops, both at home and at work, and that has never been my experience. In fact, I'm typing this on a Dell laptop, which doesn't have any of these issues you mentioned.

> I believe that no sane developer will opt for Dell's products, but rather go with Lenovo or Apple.

I'm not interested in Apple devices, since besides being very expensive, I prefer to use Linux exclusively, and as far as I know, Linux on Apple devices tends to be problematic.

As for Lenovo, I tried buying a Lenovo device once, but they canceled the sale without any explanation and without giving my money back; and I simply couldn't contact their sales department to ask for a refund (by phone they said it had to be done through email, but the emails went unanswered; I had to sue them in small claims to get my money back). Contrast that with my experience with Dell, where even when their service wasn't at its best (IIRC, some sort of logistics issue due to changing their carrier), they at least answered my phone calls.

but rather go with Lenovo

I went Lenovo, and it was not an improvement over my previous Dell. It wakes up and kills the battery when the lid is closed all the time. And at essentially the same spec I get less than half the battery and twice the fan noise compare to the Dell.

Dell XPS is marvelous. Keep it with hands and type on is so pleasureful. It is not superior in tech sense, but it is so cute.

Given concrete problem, looks like it is for all new notebooks and/or OS: I have same issue with HP ProBook 640G8 + Linux.

They wish warranty worked like this in most countries.

Modern laptops are fucking infuriating this way. I always go over my sleep and shutdown settings, trying to make things as "off" as possible yet they never seem to quite get there. Devices that are supposed to be turned off die overnight. Devices that are supposed to be off still show as connected to the wifi router. It makes you have zero faith in your computer when you do everything you can to turn it off and it still loses most of its charge after a day in your bag.

Am I the only one who is afraid that part of the reason for not fixing behaviour like this might be a nudging towards "always on" devices?

Reading through the comments it seems on Windows this might be related to WLAN and automatic updates, a rather sensitive area when it comes to security and privacy.

Happy to hear your opinions, I'd really love to be proven 100% wrong about this.

Occam's Razor suggests that it is likely promoted to boost UX. Being able to open a laptop and get going instantly (much like unlocking a phone or tablet) appeals to end users.

Personally, I couldn't give a darn. I grew up staring at a Windows 3.11 boot screen for minutes at a time. I have patience LOL

XPS15 owner here. Had this exact problem during the first year of ownership. Somehow Windows updates changed this behavior and I haven't had any more battery draining / overheating in bag since. But I will not buy Dell again. Too many little problems. I haven't had ONE problem of this kind with ThinkPad's, in maybe 25 years of use.

I haven't had ONE problem of this kind with ThinkPad

My P series ThinkPad does this all the time.

Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The laptop will overheat as a result of that action.

IOW, all modern Dell laptops are defective by design. Crazy that they can ship something this broken and stay in business...

2020 XPS 9310 user here. Running Linux on the Windows edition of this laptop, with the killer wifi ath11k QCA6390. Bios 3.0.4.

Wifi: I’m now on Linux 5.14.3 and have been chasing latest kernels all year for stable QCA6390 support - this is now all good for this edition of the laptop.

Sleep: Running hot in sleep, would always be flat in the morning etc.

As others have pointed out, there are infrequent issues where rewakening doesn’t completely - blank screen, necessitating hard power off.

However sleep/resume are much better - to the point of acceptable - after switching to AHCI disk setup in the bios.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211879#c24

Switching bios disk from RAID to AHCI allows the machine to reach C10. The creates the issue Windows 10 (Pro) no longer sees the boot drive, so you have to set it back to RAID mode if needed.

It's funny to read this after just arriving home with my XPS 15 9500 suspended in my backpack. I got it last week and installed Manjaro right away, and everything worked very well out of the box.

The fans keep going on full throttle even with a relatively idle desktop. The cores were constantly reaching 100°C while initializing a heavy dev environment.

The laptop's physical design is attractive, but abysmal. The main ventilation hole is located under the hinges, facing behind the laptop. Opening the lid will completely block this airway with a vertical wall 4 mm away. The venting grill at the bottom is lifted only a millimeter away from the table. Lifting the laptop off the table makes the fans sound way louder while lowering down in pitch - I think this is a clear sign of restricted airflow.

You really shouldn't pack this much beefy hardware in a package almost as flat as a damn biscuit.

FWIW, Dell replaced my mainboard on site and in a timely way, and without asking any stupid questions, especially not about whether it had been in a bag or the like...

Once I convinced them that no, their crappy machine is not broken because I'm running Linux on it.

I made the mistake of buying a 7390 2in1 just before the pandemic and got stuck with it. It's my favourite personal soapbox ever since. Needless to say, I won't be buying Dell again either...

Edit: there, a lengthy rant about this piece of crap and how misguided it is to give it the near-same model number as their linux flagship: https://ssb.muchmuch.coffee/%25xCjWwwuseVVLq%2F4FYbf1KUc5vHz...

Funny enough, I actually had a plenty of issues with XPS and Linux. The machine would not go to sleep when I closed the lid and put it in the bag. The result - an extremely hot and loud laptop. I think that may have been a BIOS issue, as it stopped happening after a year or so.

Often it's a problem with the Linux ACPI settings. I had to write a script that checks entries in /proc/acpi/wakeup and disables them as the laptop will otherwise often immediately come back from sleep due to being woken by the ethernet card or another device. That's not specific to Dell devices. Otherwise checking syslog often reveals why going to sleep failed, sometimes it's a particular program that refuses to freeze.

Here's the script btw for those that have the same problem, you'll need to modify the identifiers based on your hardware after identifying which devices cause the problem

    #!/bin/bash
    (cat /proc/acpi/wakeup | grep "GLAN" | grep "enabled") && echo "GLAN" > /proc/acpi/wakeup 
    (cat /proc/acpi/wakeup | grep "XHC" | grep "enabled") && echo "XHC" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

In all extended travel and especially airplane travel, safety should be your primary concern. Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The laptop will overheat as a result of that action.

With regards to transporting your laptop, safety should be your primary concern. You should always turn the laptop OFF: Select the Start button ,Click Power, Click Shut down

Wow, I'd be asking for a refund, since that would make my laptop much less usable -- when I leave work, I fold up my laptop, put it in my bag, then hop on the bus home, then when I get home, I opened it up and pick up where I left off, then repeat in the morning.

XPS (And the precision equivalents) overheat even outside bags, if you just leave them on long enough. I have had 2 in a row now that don't work properly after being powered on for a few months. The battery must be LiPo or something (Which would be a completely terrible idea in a laptop because it changes size with charge).

Just build the damn things to work when plugged in for long periods of time. I'm not going to power it down every week or even every month. I just want it to run quiet and cool, and I'd be happy for it to be twice as thick and have half the battery if that what's needed.

Or why not just make it work without the battery so I can keep the battery on a shelf until one of the few days per year I need it?

I installed linux to fix this problem (it did, at the cost of the camera, which stopped working.)

Under linux, tho, I've watched my battery max-charge decline 32% in about eighteen months.

My theory is that the XPS uses some sort Windows-integrated software to determine when the charge in the battery is critically (=battery-damagingly) low. If there's a firmware or hardware failsafe, it's too generous.

Linux lacks this integration, so the laptop chews up its battery instead of going into suspend.

My old Linux-running ThinkPad did not do this, IIRC. If I fell asleep with it beside me in bed, it would eventually power down at about 3% charge. Not great, not terrible.

Yeah, eyeing the Framework here also.

So, don't use the sleep mode for what it's for on your $1500 machine?

My 9500 is more like $4000. And it can't sleep properly.

I had a 13" XPS max specced which when sleeping suddendly sounded the alarm when the fan did not work. The sound was the same decibel as our smoke detector - in the middle of the night next to the bed.

Macs are the only computers I’ve used that have had close to zero issues with sleep. But I don’t even bother sleeping on the machines running Linux distros: with SSDs, powering on and off is so fast that I just shut the computer down whenever I’m done with it. I should time it to know for sure, but a cold boot to fully operational Firefox window feels like maybe 15 seconds. Powering off is not even five seconds. Not as fast as waking from sleep on my MBP but zippy enough for me.

That almost happened to me on an Asus, Windows waked it. I put it to sleep, put it in my backpack, left work, some hours later it was incredibly hot, lucky I saw it in time. After that I started to use hibernate when leaving work.

But at home I would still notice the laptop on by itself in the morning, or the fan starting at 2am, at some point I was just furious, that the PC would not respect my settings. I disabled wake timers, updates, schedule tasks...

Now I keep all my Windows inside boxes ...virtual boxes

I did this accidentally with an old Latitude in a backpack, and either the laptop woke up or the fan kept blowing while Windows was asleep, and when I opened the bag it was HOT!! Freaked me out, thankfully no damage to anything, but this may have caused the hard drive issues I had if the drive was working while in transit.

These reasons are why I use hibernate or shutdown before transit, and I have my lid settings to hibernate upon closed (plugged in or battery), just to be safe.

Linux -> Suspend -> S3 You just need ensure that the laptop successfully suspended and it never made a problem with mit ThinkPads.

Like others pointed out, the problem for Dell seems caused by the awkward additional standbys introduced by Microsoft "Modern Standby" and so on. We still miss some similar power target to what phones use. Probably 'systemctl suspend' should mean hard S3 and LID-Close something like phones behavior.

Dell could solve this. Seems easy enough to notice that the laptop is closed, sleeping, and overheating. At that point the firmware could do something about it.

I don't miss having to worry about this type of nonsense. Is it a Dell problem? Is it Microsoft problem? Don't care - I just need my laptop to work.

I've had every Microsoft laptop I can think of. Dell, Lenovo, Acer etc...

In 2014 I switched to Apple Macbook Air and have remained Apple ever since despite the fact that I run a .NET tech stack product company.

Yes the Macbook pro keyboard debacle was a shit show but otherwise my Macs "just work".

I can't believe Dell and/or Microsoft have fucked up laptop design so badly that you can't keep a sleeping laptop in your bag. It has to be intentional. They are trying to lose users. Anybody with a functioning brain will realize that this is a massive regression and cannot be allowed to be released in the wild. Imagine paying $2500 for a Dell XPS and not being able to keep it on sleep!

I’ve found that dell laptops don’t sleep when unplugged from a dock in clamshell mode with an external monitor.

It was pleasant to find when I’d left work to the airport after unplugging it and stuffing it my bag, that the closed computer was burning up and at critical battery.

Now MS/dell Claims that’s a feature not a bug and that they’ve expanded the situations where that occurs. What are they smoking? Oh yeah burning laptop fumes

Did they change the meaning of "hibernate"? Showing it in the "power" menu has also been disabled, though you can assign it to the power button and then press the button.

I have a Dell laptop that I thought was hibernated. Closed lid usually sets it to hibernate.

Well that didn't work this one time and the laptop was left on in my backpack... Well something fried and now my laptop would not recognize the dell charger and tell me to plug it into a genuine Dell charger half the time and would not charge. It was a 2017 model so when this happened last year I bought a Lenovo.

I have an Inspiron that differs from the same issue. Worse is that it has an Nvidia Quadro that overheats the moment I put it on a flat surface.

The fan is loud, and it just won't go to sleep, so I end up always shutting down.

I rarely use it, and instead brought my own laptop to work. It's a shame because the Dell that I used at a previous employer also suffered from thermal and noise issues.

'How to ruin the user experience' training in master level!

There is some marginally/sometimes/circumstantially useful fetur.... no, not feature... thing, that requires extensive attention to avoid permanent damage to your precious data and other properties. Gives some wee bit convenience but cause lots of inconvenience and the prospect of serious damage.

Way to go Dell! : /

A PC in sleep/hibernate/standby mode is not OFF. It's in a (very) low power mode.

Hibernate is off. You can pull the battery and put it back just fine.

Both my work and private laptop can (but not always do) behave like that. Additionally, depending on the version of vendor bloatware, they may not wake up without a hard reset and just keep doing... something in the background. I think it has something to do with the lockscreen.

Windows is Windows is Windows I guess.

My private laptop boots in under 30s, so I stopped paying any mind to this.

That's because they know how shitty is sleep function really. Ok, laptop is in a sleep mode successfully. But doing anything to it or even looking at it funny will immediately wake it. Moving mouse, switching off mouse, inserting or removing mouse dongle, inserting or removing headphones and so on. I simply stopped using sleep mode altogether.

> Ok, laptop is in a sleep mode successfully. But doing anything to it or even looking at it funny will immediately wake it.

The XPS that I recently replaced had to be closed at night, which annoyed me every day. If left open, it would detect that it was idle and shut off the display. Except that that only worked on the laptop screen. The external monitor would go through a permanent cycle of shutting off, waking up, displaying a "no signal" message, shutting off, waking up...

This doesn't happen with other laptops on the same monitor. Something was broken pretty badly.

I have a 9310, it took some time to realize the laptop was not sleeping because it has no indicators. After some digging I realized the culprit was sensors which woke the system immediately after any slight movement. I'm now removing intel_hid module automatically before sleeping, no more issues since. But I must admit, this fault is moronic.

Basically the Dell XPS laptop SO BADLY DESIGNED it can not handle the excess heat of being put into a standard, used-by-everyone laptop bag!!

I would assume they just laid out the standard "Example Design" without any thermal design analysis that NORML ENGINEERING companies do with any of the latest deep nanometer parts.

The thing is: if you do NOT using good power supply or thermal design, the CPUs, RAM, Flash, etc. will only have an operating lifetime on the short end of the current 5-10 years usable life for these parts. If you overheat them, they will attain <5 year lifespan. If you do good thermal design, you'll get closer to 10 years. If you use a schlock power supply to charge the battery and use the battery power, you will attain <5 year lifespan. If you design an ultra-low-ripple power supply and use quality battery power chips, you will get closer to 10 years.

We are now at device physics lifespans that are so close to economic lifespans that now this kind of design MATTERS ENTIRELY. If you cut corners, you will quickly destroy your brand value because you will not be able to exceed economic lifespan expectations with your physical/physics-defined lifespan realities.

The standard business-as-usual will fail now because things have changed now.

I had to bust out the PowerShell console on my windows machine to manipulate its wake sources to block it from waking on LAN since something would wake it within 10 minutes after sleep every time.

I can't imagine how infuriating that would be if it were a laptop and that behavior was running down the battery and heating it up.

It's remarkable to me how generally pleasant the phone/tablet power management experience is, in comparison to laptops. It's such complete shit on laptops. My laptop has better battery life in S0 low power idle than either S3 or (Linux) S2idle. I blame ACPI as a standard, and all of its bearers.

This is why people use Apple laptops. I’d be fine using Linux as my OS. But my employer issues my laptop and chooses the model. If serious non-Apple laptop manufacturers are still making crap like this, how do I know my employer won’t choose hardware as bad as this for their Windows and Linux employees?

I agree, you're going to get downvoted but it's just true. This _is_ why people use MacBooks. It just isn't the same experience in other cases, especially now with the extreme quietness and performance of M1, but even before the standby behaviour was extremely reliable.

I’m not a Windows user anymore but could this potentially help? I came across it on my Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/dragosr/status/1441894003822120960?s=21

Had this issue with my XPS 9570. I also had the heatsink issue that is well documented by now, and upon opening it found further significant manufacturing defects that Dell refused to acknowledge.

Never buying a Dell again. It's a pity because they appear solid and well-made from appearances and specs.

As an owner of XPS 15 9560, I can tell you that the XPS line is a gift that keeps giving. 6 generations of XPS laptops since 2021 and they barely fixed most of the overheating issues in that time period, while charging premium prices for each barely-functioning product along the way.

My first XPS had a fun little design quirk where the laptop display itself obstructed the (single and only) exhaust vent.

Out of the factory, the airflow was acceptable, but after a year of use and dust buildup, guess what... the laptop would overheat!

Double whammy -- the air that _could_ get through was so hot that it would also deform the part of the screen that obstructed the vent.

I don't use Windows but this still happened to me with my XPS 15 2020.

I put it in sleep and shoved it in a bag while going on a hike. Fortunately it was only an hour hike and I could literally feel the heat emanating from the machine through the fabric of the bag. Don't do it.

Can't the laptop just turn off or hibernate when it gets too hot in a bag or sleeve (or both)?

I have a Dell 9570,three years old, and the problem is infuriating. I forgot about this and got home just last week to find my laptop was about a million degrees.

This is my third XPS laptop - my first two were two of the best computers I've ever owned.

This one has put me off Dell completely.

Similar issues for me on Precision 5520 (stock Ubuntu). Laptop nearly fried itself in my backpack from overheating—-can’t reason causally for sure but seems like it destroyed a chip involved with power regulation and damaged some liquid crystals in the display.

So has anyone's bag actually caught fire due to this?

If so, can we put it in a Dell commercial? Just grab any old Dell advertisement stock footage and dub it with fire alarm noises and a spouse yelling in the distance "honey, your room caught fire again!"

I had a backpack melt because of this. There is a hole through and through, about the size of a half dollar.

Surely this sort of stuff won’t happen on an Apple Silicon machine.

It really does look like the competition has a lot of catching up to do. But probably after the M1X / M2 Macbook announcements, the competitors will be set back another 2 years behind Apple again.

MacBooks have similar functionality ("Power Nap"), which allows for some telemetry (updating your iCloud calendar/drive/mail, MDM telemetry for corporate-owned devices, etc) while asleep. It hasn't been an issue though.

This is not good. In the before-times, closing the lid, throwing my laptop in my bag, and commuting happened twice daily. I suppose that I'm extra glad I chose a Mac with my current employer - even if I don't commute daily anymore.

and I have a dell bag that came with the laptop...

Pre-Covid, I did daily run commuting with a couple different models of XPS 13 with Ubuntu installed and suspended and didn't have a problem.

I always used S3 suspend and never hiberation because I quit trusting and trying hiberation on Linux long ago.

"Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The laptop will overheat as a result of that action."

And here I just thought it was a crappy BIOS...many is the time I've undocked, thrown it in the messenger bag, then pulled it out at another location only to have it roasting with the fan on full.

So, sleep isn't sleep apparently

I had this issue when using Windows but not on Linux. Sleep worked fine on Linux.

Not on brand new Intel laptops. They've now removed s3 sleep hardware support.

This is why my XPS13 laptop's battery is swollen. It was extremely hot many times I pulled it out of the bag.

And because of the battery swell, I cannot use the trackpad clicks anymore. Dell should recall and help customers.

This happened to me several times with my 2017 XPS, and as well to my business partner with the same laptop.

It would get so hot that you could barely touch it to pull it out. I'm amazed there were no fires from this.

I have a very recent Dell laptop that has terrible standby performance on Linux (as in the battery fully drains in 8-12 hours on standby). Could this be related or is it a Windows only issue?

My Microsoft desktop restarts itself overnight to install updates no matter what registry settings I change.

I’ve lost a lot of work this way.

Later this year, I will buy the 2021 Macbook, and put Linux on the desktop. I can’t wait!

And this is why I got a passively cooled laptop without a fan. It's very weak, but it's worth it to not have any anxiety about it overheating in my bag. Absolutely fantastic for college.

Why would it ever break?

Countless times I've had my laptops fail to suspend due to kernel bugs (heh), fall into a spin loop (e.g. in a kernel panic) and get quite hot in my backpack. Nothing broke.

Did anyone else notice that the cookie popup on this Dell page had the option to "declinate all cookies"? I did a double take to see if this was a real Dell page based on that.

I own a Dell xps laptop. I will never buy anything from dell again if there's anything remotely competitive.

Nice to see in this thread that it's not just bad luck. It's Dell all the way.

I learnt quickly that my circa 2016 MacBook Pro 15” would do this too. Sometimes when I got it out of my satchel, most of the battery had been drained and it was far too hot to use.

This fried my laptop and I assumed it was the stupid machines fault, I can't believe I'm just now learning windows itself is to blame. How is this bug even possible?

The whole idea of sleep is so we can put it in a bag, walk somewhere else, take it out and continue working.

If this doesn't work on a mainstream product it is defective in my opinion.

I started disabling Sleep/Hibernate on all my machines a decade ago. Everything just worked better without it. Sad to see they still haven't sorted it out.

This was the primary reason I switched to Apple about 10 years ago. I just wanted a laptop I could reliably shut and open and have it act like I expect it to.

Dell service quality is getting down.

Warranty is something they were proud of.

Now, it's just came an absurdly inefficient, frustrating, and wasteful experience.

I have an XPS 2-in-1. Nice machine, except for the so-so battery life and the unsupported webcam on linux, it was a good working laptop.

I paid for the biggest config at the time, and included a $300 premium guarantee with on site servicing.

One year later, the keyboard starts acting up, then the touch pad.

I contacted their support, and while the people on the phone were polite and competent (!), their ludicrous booking system to get a person on site to change my keyboard was a nightmare.

Took me a month of frustrating cat and mouse game to finally get someone at my door.

They changed my keyboard (and for some reason my speakers and battery O_o), routine stuff. "No need to do a backup for that", they said.

Took them 3 hours. They were operating blind, no manual, no spec, no pictures taken before removing parts.

Of course, once done, the machine would not boot anymore. Also the touch pad stopped working completely (tested in the UEFI).

They let me with an unusable machine and left. This was my main working machine. Thankfully, I haven't listen to them and did my homework, I had 2 full data backup and a fallback laptop, albeit way less appropriate for my freelancing missions.

One month and dozens of phone calls+emails later, they come back. Change the whole thing again. Machine is still FUBAR.

They leave again.

2 weeks later, support contacted me to offer me an exchange with a brand new laptop (remember, I didn't need a backup). They should take an appointment in 48 hours.

I'm still waiting as of today, no appointment email, a broken laptop, doing work on a machine were I have to kill the browser regularly because it swaps, doing web dev.

All the staff were nice, but their process, boy, their process sucks.

The worst thing is, it's probably made to avoid some kind of abuse of the system or to save money, but they spent to much time with me they wasted tons of cash, and end up replacing my machine anyway.

Everybody loose with a service like that.

If people are still wondering why the framework laptop is appealing, there it is. I know what my next machine will be now.

> I contacted their support, and while the people on the phone were polite and competent (!)

I contacted Dell support recently when my new laptop didn't send an image to my (Dell) external monitor.

The support guy asked me what cable I was using. It's DisplayPort on the monitor end and Thunderbolt USB-C on the laptop end. It works with the Dell laptop the recent one replaced.

The support guy proceeded to look up the new laptop's product page on Dell's public website, see language saying that for the Thunderbolt port to work with DisplayPort, you need to buy an adapter, and recommend that I buy a USB-C to MiniDP adapter. It was left unexplained how I would plug my USB-C Thunderbolt cable into the MiniDP adapter.

I wouldn't trust Dell support to know how to put on pants.

Well, that explains: I have a XPS 13 since jan. 2019 and last year I had to replace the battery. It bulged, pushing the keyboard up a bit. Luckily no fire

Which brand did you use? Can you share the link? I have the same issue.

I thought hibernate was supposed to be the mode when memory is dumped to the persistent storage and the device is turned off? That definition changed?

I wish it could be REALLY clear when a laptop is off. What happens when I shut the lid? I don't know, I can't see the power button anymore.

You’d think companies could at least keep things the same instead of making it actively worse. Laptops sleeping is largely a solved problem

The power management of dell XPS 17 is absolutely awful. Sometimes it hibernates. Sometimes it doesn`t. I have tried absolutely everything.

Improper storage is a perfectly reasonable reason to void a warranty. This is accidental damage, and Dell sells a separate plan for that.

Is the S4 still supported in Windows 10? And how do you go about finding out if S3 or S4 are supported in a laptop you may want to buy?

This is why the M1 iPad would be amazing as an open hardware platform… my 10 year old iPad loses a couple percent a day while asleep.

It seems likely to me that’s true because it is not an open platform.

Yet another reason to dislike Microsoft Windows.

https://archive.is/lMvTa

Odd, how installing linux solves the issue... (speaking from personal experience with 3 different XPSs)

I've had an XPS running Linux for 8 years. Never was an issue. The problem definitely is Windows...

All I hear is "don't buy XPS laptop we lost the know-how to build them properly"

This has been a problem with Dell laptops since as long as I've been using them (2002).

Same with my Dell Precision... I have to do a full shutdown before putting it in my bag.

My home-built PC will never stay asleep, so I have to shut it off. I don't get it.

I bought an Alienware laptop in 2010. I booted it up in the shop, then packed it up thinking I've shut it down. After I got home I found out that it went to sleep in the middle of setting up process.

I used it at varying capacities all the way until last year when I lost it in an apartment fire.

Sounds more like "Do not leave a laptop running Windows in a bag"?

"...if you leave it turned ON".

Just putting it in a bag does not void the warranty.

So, it isn't a problem if you just use Linux on your Dell XPS, right?

Dell has always been a mid-to-trash brand but this is hilariously awful

What are the good alternatives for an XPS like laptop that runs Linux?

Thinkpads

Had this same problem with another laptop brand too. It was scary.

Never had any issue like that with a zbook on Linux.

This is misleading. Simply putting the laptop is a bag won't void its warranty. OTOH, putting in the laptop bag while it's on and letting it cook will.

Not misleading at all. Their sleep is BROKEN compared to what people's expectation of SLEEP are.

What the actual fuck. That's insane.

Do not taunt the happy fun laptop.

Learned the hard way in 2003.

Do they sell you bags?

RIP laptops.

certainly this isn't news.

Does anyone even use hibernate in 2021...? Every windows/linux machine I've tried using it on just results in a terrible experience. Generally my system just hangs or takes 10+ minutes to save to disk or restore (despite having a modern workstation with 32GB+ of RAM and a nearly empty high end NVMe SSD).

It's been the first thing I've disabled for years, power management is decent enough that a desktop system will draw a marginal amount of power at idle even if you don't use suspend or hibernate.

Of course, on my macbook it 'just works' and I've left everything default in terms of power management, I assume it does something similar to hibernate/S3 sleep but it always comes back instantly and without draining the battery while closed. I carry it in a backpack commonly and have never had issues with it being hot when I take it out.

On desktops I've never had a problem with hibernate either with windows or Linux.

On HDD it takes time, but no longer than booting from cold.

On SSD it's less than ten seconds to hibernate or boot.

I've had to tweak wake on lan and disable mouse waking pc etc but that's not different for sleep

Laptops however are a nightmare and just don't or won't hibernate properly

What the hell is going on with US software companies? Torching people's machines just to collect a little more data makes no sense!

Buy a Tuxedo Computer!

I have a XPS with Linux, closing the lid does almost nothing but turn the screenlock on.

I always turn it off, reboot is in 2/seconds so it's no problem.

Great laptop, had it for 7 years still faster than 2020 XPS with windows.

That's just misconfigured then. The system sends a signal to the OS. The OS is then free to do whatever. If you have configured to screenlock then it will screenlock.

Yeah windows boot (realistically, wakeup too) has become ridiculously time-consuming on the few desktops I maintain that have to be windows. If I hadn't already switched everything else I control to Linux, boot time itself would be enough to motivate that.

MacBook folks: we’re in 2021. These laptops turn on and off very quickly. Forget about sleep, hibernation etc. Just shut it down.

Semi-related:

"The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28606962

Probably a better option for many people's next purchase (when they add Ryzen models anyway! ;>)

I don't see how this is related other than it also being a laptop.

Clickbait.

What they actually say: "Under no circumstances should you leave a laptop powered on and in any sleep/hibernate/standby mode when placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin. The PC will overheat as a result of that action. Any resulting damage will not be covered by the Dell warranty."

Fair enough. A laptop that overheats because it's been left in an enclosed space whilst not off is not damage caused by a fault of the device.

I don't think this is clickbait; I think any normal user would think that closing the lid puts the laptop into a state where putting it in a bag is entirely safe to do.

Microsoft seems to have decided to entirely break this expectation such that closing the lid of a laptop puts it into this weird not-really-suspended state, such that putting it in a confined space could cause it to overheat. It's... pretty user-unfriendly and IMO stupid.

Absolutely fair, from Dell's POV.

The fault lies with Microsoft, mismanaging the user expectations about shutting down the computer.

The computer should absolutely not wake up from sleep to do things, if the result could be that it overheats. It's like saying people shouldn't pocket their smartphones.

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