I have a Dell xps and will never buy another laptop from dell. It's an embarrassment how awful if is. Close the lid without full shutdown, warranty voided bad.
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.
Shut it down or hibernate and you won't have to worry about that.
And we recently could close laptops, have them sleep/hibernate and not wake up until you open the screen again so sticking them in a backpack was fine.
Not sure if the issue is Windows or the hardware but it's a recent thing.
Dell’s attempt to disclaim warranty in a situation like that won’t fly in Australia.
Not sure about user expectations but it’s the first time I heard about laptops overheating in standby mode.
That does not convey "placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin" in any way.
If a computer cannot simply have its lid closed before being placed in its bag it simply is /not/ a laptop. It should not be advertised as a laptop and it should have a big f&%ing warning on it telling you that it will break if you treat it the way you expect to treat a laptop.
Either Dell didn't know they messed up their laptop design and when they found out made the decision not to recall the faulty product or they knew and sold it fraudulently. "This is a laptop - but we know it isn't and will break if you treat it like one warranty void, sucks if you believed us."
Either way Dell made the decision to screw their customers. There's no getting around that. It's a choice they made.
Sadly Hibernate is very complicated and has largely been deprecated from both Windows and Linux in favor of Sleep.
Since Hibernate is gone, let's take it off the list.
Sleep (S3) has been largely removed from these laptops in favor of a "low power mode" that emulates but does not actually sleep the device.
This is why it was previously very safe to keep your laptop in sleep or hibernate mode in a bag, but now isn't- not because user behavior has changed, or that software has changed, but because Dell's hardware has.
A shutdown and startup incur significant setup times, not just for the computer but mental workflow- remembering to open your applications back to where you left them, etc.
In the past (5 years ago) it was normal to expect a laptop to go to sleep when the lid closed and then wake itself back up.
If Dell is telling people not to expect to be able to simply sleep their laptop by closing it and then putting it in a bag, then they're not expecting people to treat the laptop as a laptop. Back in the 80s, we called such computers "Luggables".
A $2,000 laptop in 2021 should not be assumed to be a glorified luggable, it should be a laptop with the same functionality as laptops had in 2010.
Secondly, the number and types of peripherals were tricky to reconstitute and grab the state of, and this made working with the OS tricky. It would be possible that an application might be in the middle of an operation with a device that was no longer present, for example.
Sleep was easier, and yes, it "just worked".
It feels as though laptops are less functional now than they used to be because of stuff like this!