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Comment by Darmody | Hacker News Reader

It's not exactly like that.

    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.

Why would you put a laptop on a bag if it is still running and expect the warranty to cover any damage if it overheats? What's next? Expect the warranty to cover you taking showers while playing with your laptop?

Shut it down or hibernate and you won't have to worry about that.

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I would absolutely expect warranty to cover damage from overheating. It’s supposed to have adequate protection to avoid such damage. Leave it completely turned on, cover its fans, stuff it in a warm blanket and load its CPU until it overheats (slowly, quickly, doesn’t matter) and if it sustains any permanent damage it is not fit for purpose.

Dell’s attempt to disclaim warranty in a situation like that won’t fly in Australia.

I guess you can always claim it didn't overheat in a bag but I still think that storing a turned on laptop in a bag or sealing somehow its ventilation it's a misuse and it shouldn't be covered by the warranty.

I agree, but shouldn't any computer's bios power everything off if temperatures get too high?

My laptop from 2013 does. Found that out the "oh, shit" way more than one time.

Yes, but I guess in a sealed bag everything gets hotter and hotter, not only the CPU/GPU.

Your own quote mentions you can't hibernate it.

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.

Unless Windows is doing something weird, hibernate is no different that shutting it down.

Problem is with the drivers, many devices don't support resuming after hibernate.

Hibernate is a tricky term that doesn't mean the same thing to all people. The working definition I use is all state is dumped from memory to disk and then retrieved upon startup.

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.

Has hibernate been deprecated in Windows 11? Because I couldn’t get sleep to work properly on my less than year old Dell laptop but turning hibernate back on works perfectly. It actually turns the machine off. I’m not sure by what technical means it achieves that (I thought hibernate meant suspend Ram to disk and then turn off) but it works. In windows 10 you can use “Powercfg -h on” to turn it on.

I remember it worked normally back at the end of 1990s with my first laptops, just close the lid, open and everything is back up instantly, no heating at all.

Hibernate eventually began posing trouble for a few reasons. Firstly, as memory sizes increased, the time to hibernate became longer as you had to entirely serialize memory to disk.

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!

Seems like the GP summarized what you quoted perfectly.

Not sure about user expectations but it’s the first time I heard about laptops overheating in standby mode.

> Close the lid without full shutdown, warranty voided bad.

That does not convey "placed in a bag, backpack, or in an overhead bin" in any way.

The difference between a laptop and a "portable desktop" is you close the lid of a laptop and put it in your laptop bag, stand up and leave. Be it from the plane, train, cafe, or anywhere else you please.

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.

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