State of S3 – Your Laptop is no Laptop anymore – a personal Rant

I've been on the "modern standby" hate train for as long as it's existed. Not because it's such a terrible idea per se. You can debate that if you like. I hate it because it fundamentally changes the behavior behind an existing API (lid close, suspend button, or ACPI S3 trigger, take your pick) without warning, and in most cases, without the ability to get the old behavior back.

Regardless of a valid use case for "modern standby", there is DEFINITELY a use case for "old suspend to RAM" and "old hybrid suspend to RAM", which have de facto been blown away by the change.

I have no problem with adding a new sleep state that makes sense for other users. Go ahead and add S22 for that exotic sleep state manufacturing robots use between shifts. S344 for bluetooth devices waiting for reconnection. Whatever, I don't care. But don't replace an existing PRIMARY UI PATTERN with them.

To be fair this is not on microsoft for inventing S0, or even pushing for it for windows devices. It's on device manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo for dropping S3 from UEFI in favor of it.

I struggled to get through the top half of this post, which is about various Thinkpad model types that the author had. But the second part, where the author explains the various sleep modes and what it means, was very informative & worth a read!

I've personally always solved this problem by enabling "Hibernate" (not sure if that's a Windows-specific term) which writes the entire RAM contents to a file and then shuts down completely. The downside is that it takes a few seconds to boot (impressively few seconds on a modern machine, actually), but still, the laptop doesn't come on instantly. But I like knowing that there's no chance the laptop somehow turns on and overheats/drains in the backpack, because it's completely off.

This doesn't take away from the author's rant at all, the idea that a sleep mode would need to support notifications or updates (!) is absurd. A good sleep mode would need to only support "minimum power usage" and "fast wake-up" and nothing else. But with MS's usual mix of excellence and absurd stupidity, that appears to not exist, and "hibernate" is to me an acceptable compromise. My understanding is that Macbooks have gotten this right for decades already, pretty nuts that PCs lag behind so much.

> receive Windows Updates during Sleep mode

That is just peak level stupidity. I sometimes boot into Windows, and every time Windows Update runs, the fans are on high, my system is taken hostage ("Do not turn off your computer - updates ready 100%" - showing for 15 minutes), and there is nothing I can do about it.

Compared to this, an `apt upgrade` is basically an instant action (only kernel updates take a bit longer). Too bad Ubuntu is trying to break that with snap, but it is still a minor inconvenience.

For anyone reading this, I thought S3 was referring to the AWS S3 and was really confused initially. Instead S3 here refers to a sleep state - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-to....

Is there any application of "Modern Standby" that is actually delivering significant value to customers somewhere? A lot of the theoretical benefits of it, IMO, have been relatively theoretical. Perhaps Windows updates, but the computers I've used with Modern Standby still have to spend time installing updates when awake.

I cannot imagine what the benefit of receiving notifications and other information like this on a Windows system would be. As far as I know, very, very few apps are programmed for the native "App" development flow (or even to use the notifications api) as opposed to "desktop" apps, and the number only gets smaller as you go into long tail enterprise apps. Perhaps this was designed for Outlook, but I think the use case is dubious.

Of course, there are millions of laptops in the wild, many of which are undoubtedly used by the people who work on Windows. Every time I find the laptop closed and running its fans, or find a computer in a bag that is slightly warm near the CPU (expected behaviour of working Modern Standby), I wonder whether it's just my computer or if it's every single one of them out there. Do people just accept that their computer has to be either shut down or will have an unknown amount of remaining power? It seems like there would have been a huge push to get this fixed if it was really broken, but I rarely hear users talking about it.

Of course I do wonder whether with the advent of the new Qualcomm ARM CPUs, whether they have finally managed to get Modern Standby to be a good clone of what Android devices do...

One of the top reasons I'm staying with MacBooks. It's not unusual for my laptop to have hundreds of days of uptime. Going back to shutting down everything every time I close the lid is unusable for me at this point.

Whoever fixes this first will make a lot of money.

Edit: SteamDeck is also very good at this and that's why I'm sticking to it for handheld gaming.

Laptop manufacturers on their own clearly didn't hurt this (dying) category enough over the years prioritizing shallow form over functionality and constant design regressions, Microsoft had to push some more of their deranged "vision" too. S0ix was a joke when introduced years ago and remains one, but it's not funny to laugh at it anymore because its existence eventually killed the actual sleep state an user expects. There is, without an ounce of doubt, no benefit for an user to have their laptop device continue operating when it's expected to be "sleeping" without intentional, conscious instruction to resume work. Some of the proclaimed advantages to it I distinctly remember were "receiving emails" and "automatic updates when the device is not in use", and while the former is mostly useless because it's not a smartphone, the latter is actively harmful to an user's interests when unprompted. Hibernation on linux and windows (where it's secretly kept away for whatever reason since 8 or so) is far more predictable with any modern sabotaged devices missing S3 support, and modern drives are performant and large enough that it's not going to make much of a difference, at least for pauses that one expects to last more than an hour or two. Some more of the endless compromises to put up with because of unrestrained "courage".

This has destroyed one of my older laptops, it decided on its own to patch itself while in a laptop bag in sleep mode. It was a "workstation" laptop that can draw something like 60W from battery, and it promptly cooked itself. The plastic melted and smoke was coming out of the bag. On a moving train.

Here's the thing: this self-serving behaviour from Microsoft will eventually kill someone, or quite possibly a large number of people. It's just a matter of time until a high-powered laptop does this in someone's luggage on a plane, catches fire, and then there will be congressional investigations like we had with the Boeing 737 MCAS system.

In both cases near-monopoly companies are gambling with peoples' lives to meet some internal KPI that in the grand scheme of things just doesn't matter... but it does to some manager's bonus, so you see... people are going to have to die.

I don't really understand what the fuzz about fast boot is. Why can't most people just wait a few seconds? It's not like boot still takes minutes.

I almost always shut down my laptop. This serves me two purposes:

1) It saves power

2) I always start with a fresh session, keeping distractions at a minimum and having habits to "finish" the current task I am working at. (I do the same with browsers for example. Here I even less frequently save my session).

There are a few exceptions where I know I'll just take a quick break and resume work shortly, but they are rare. No, you don't have to have everything always available within milliseconds. No, I don't need notifications always on (so I guess I agree with the author here). But maybe just different tastes, different habits.

I don't know if this is true, but I talked about a broader topic along those lines with my therapist recently and she was like: 'We invent all these smart things to save time and have more for ourselves, but in reality people have less time, because then they just want to put more tasks into the same timespan'. I have absolutely no idea if there is any truth to that, but it feels true on my empirical observations. Embrace slowness!

I am completely fed up with OEM presumption that broken Windows shall forevermore be what computers come preinstalled with.

Windows has been broken since XP and linux desktop has been usable for decades now.

I refuse to buy more computers preloaded with windows or built with ANY consideration of what incompetent Microsoft want.

Why do we accept being spat upon and treated like basement bums when we put our money on the table???

I use an IdeaPad with a 4000 series Ryzen. It works fine for the time being.

Articles like these make me afraid that the damn thing will break eventually and I'll have to spend exorbitants amounts of money on something like a Framework to get a usable Linux experience.

Not to mention that having a fake-off state like S0ix is a golden ticket for covert surveillance (like our phones don't do enough for the gestapo). I don't think anybody cares about Cortana, even less so on a suspended laptop. The notifications and update angle is really suspicious as well.

This is a great rant!

Steve Jobs had an insight that a computer was just another household appliance

But it was built by engineers who came from the homebrew world

This is a great example of how our appliance has gotten worse, even though it’s on hardware that is 1000x the throughput, and we’ve lost the ability to configure it too

I have no idea how this is still as fucked as it is. Nothing in this space has worked properly ever.

Moved to Apple Silicon in 2021 after my Dell Precision cooked itself (and my lunch!) to death in my bag on a train. No issues since.

My new ThinkPad, which I absolutely love otherwise, keeps the CPU fans running if I put it to "sleep". Which left me completely flabbergasted the first time it happened! I've had to force-enable hibernation and use that for any kind of backpack travel. Which will shorten the lifespan of the SSD, but what else am I supposed to do?

  Their aim with S0ix is relatable and can somewhat be compared to Apples move to force USB-C on everyone - which is great and a necessity to be done by a market leader.

So, wait for the EU to mandate companies use the same standard? Even then, there were rumors that Apple was going to cripple non-Apple brand chargers.

The "fun" part is that smartphones/tablets implement those features with S3 (CPU off, RAM in self-refresh).

Updates? Well here is an RTC to wake-up. Voice control? Well here is an always on audio dsp. Remote wake-up? Well here is a WiFi frame filter to trigger IRQ.

I think it isn't tractable on most laptops because of all the hardware that has been onloaded to software, and the hardware isn't capable of those hardware filtering, and partly OS and drivers are probably to blame too. An embesded OS takes under 1s to wakeup, so even managing TCP KeepAlives wih resume/suspend is realistic on those devices. Not so much when wakeup takes 10s.

> Microsoft describes S3 as “Legacy Sleep”

There’s something breathtakingly arrogant about that

S0 standby sucks. The laptop inevitably turns into a fan heater in my backpack and when you get it out to use it the battery is dead. You can spend ages on google finding obscure registry keys to tweak to turn off network in S0 and tweak hibernate settings which partly helps but it's like we've gone a big step backwards here.

I'm always amazed by the tales of people who seemingly use sleep mode on the laptops without issues. In my experience every time I try this trick the laptop wakes up on its own in my backpack and turns into a heatbomb. This reliably reproduces on all half a dozen laptops I've used over past decade or more. So I was kinda trained to always turning off laptops for transporting.

Is sleep really fixed and finally can be used on Windows? Do you tweak power settings or configs for that in any way?

Well, they're making the world harder to live in every day.

So also acquiring a new laptop is now a pain in the ass... good to know.

Without getting technical about it... my previous work laptop (2019 vintage) when suspended, would blink a light until unsuspended - hours or days later - with still usable battery capacity left.

The current one. Fold it shut, stick it in my backpack. No noticeable powering-up or overheating issues, but if it's more than a few hours, the thing has a drained battery and is fully shut down. Luckily Windows "fast startup" mitigates the pain - it doesn't take very long for it to unsuspend-from-disk and reach a usable state again, with apps still open etc. No idea what Linux would do here. I actually have Linux on my previous work laptop (Elitebook 840 G6) and "proper" suspend works just fine on it.

LTT had a rant about this [modern sleep] and I really hoped it would draw some attention given his size and reach. It is truly mind-blowing that not even Apple got it right.

Kinda telling how Google switched to S0(s2idle) on Android since Pixel 3 or 4, fixed up most of their own drivers, submitted fixes to mainline (and probably to firmware developers too) and a few years later every Android device uses S0 and sleeps flawlessly.

Meanwhile MS have been trying to do the same since 2012 and there are still numerous issues.

I'm just glad my Lenovo Legion still uses S3.

This sounds totally nuts. I guess I’m happy to be running a laptop where when I close the lid, it will sleep and have battery when I open the lid, in an hour or in 2 days. I thought that was the basic requirement for being a laptop? The essential feature. It’s so surprising to hear things have gone backwards in the Windows world.

My suggestion to anyone dealing with annoying power management is to get a MacBook Pro (you can get tons of ram, we are ordering 96gb models for our engineers) and run your preferred OS in a full screen VM if you don’t like MacOS. I did this for years because I don’t trust Linux to manage battery or reliably pair with Bluetooth devices (especially Bluetooth audio), but I much preferred Linux window management and access to Docker.

Parallels runs Windows quite well, and either that, Virtualbox, or the various apps that are thin layers over the system Hypervisor.framework all do the trick.

One of the big reasons that I moved to MacOS in ~2004 was that, at that time, for reasonable money you couldn't get a laptop that had any sort of reliably sensible sleep behaviour in Linux, and even Windows was iffy. The iBook had no such issues.

It's somewhat surprising that this is still the case, 20 years later.

> Therefore Consumers have the option to state their disapproval with the current state of S0ix by buying Laptops that still support S3.

I’d like to do this, as I find a laptop that cannot last in sleep for at least a week ill-suited for my needs. Where do I go to figure out if my next laptop supports proper sleep?

My old ASUS laptop that triggers complete poweroff when a sleep command is sent to the motherboard, making sure you lose any work you had open as punishment for assuming it had a sleep mode: "I'm four parallel universes ahead of you."

I don't understand how a laptop manufacturer can ship products with such a fatal flaw and still be in business. Is the windows laptop market so dreadful it does not stand out?

Or do people do not care because they do not use laptops on the go anymore?

Oh this hits deep. I recently installed Windows on a laptop after a long time of only using it on a desktop. I thought I was going crazy - where had proper sleep gone ?!

'Luckily' hibernate only takes about 4x as long as sleep while still being just quick enough not to be too annoying.

I agree with the author that it totally defies the purpose of a laptop. Another terrible move by Microsoft

It is why I will fork out 2-3x for a Macbook, because apart from the screens being amazing, when I close the lid, I know it does exactly what 99.99999% of the population expects it to do, and I can safely put it in my bag.

Yup, I'm using S3 even with windows just to save battery and not have laptop in "drained and hot" state when it is suddenly needed. F--k microsoft.

In lenovo x1 they call it "Linux sleep" in bios settings.

My solution to this was to setup my laptop to boot in less than ten seconds. I could generally go from shut down to logged in with Obsidian, Firefox, and Anki open in about 30 seconds.

The article is qualified as a rant so I don’t expect to read proposals there but how can we pick a laptop with a working sleep mode? Is there a database like proton db somewhere?

Having owned countless Mac notebooks over the last 30 years — starting from the PowerBook 140 up through the M1 MacBook Pro — I can tell you with confidence that Apple has made the same sleep change shenanigans mentioned in OP’s article.

It used to be that you could count on a sleeping Mac to stay asleep until you explicitly woke it up by opening the lid, pressing a key on the keyboard, or pressing the trackpad (or separate trackpad buttons — yes, those used to exist). Perhaps more importantly, you could count on the sleep function to have barely any effect on the Mac battery.

I don’t recall when, but at some point over the aforementioned three decades, Apple started changing the terms of this sleep contract.

It seems Apple decided that some functions should still be available when the Mac is “sleeping”, with no way to restore the previous behavior. As a result, random wake-ups are the new normal, replete with unexpected battery drainage.

I have seen modern MacBooks go to “sleep” with an 80% charge at night, only to be rendered dead with a 0% battery level by morning. Does something this extreme happen often? No. But it never happened before. And moderate battery loss while sleeping? That happens very often on today’s MacBooks.

Your mileage may very. And Apple probably continues to implement better computer sleep behavior than competing vendors. But I would argue that people who think MacBook sleep behavior is excellent… have never experienced how it behaved in the past. That behavior was superb.

But sadly, I imagine most people have never experienced that excellence.

State of S3 turns out to literally be what this article is about, but I still feel mislead expecting cloud storage not machine sleep states.

> But in Contrast, Apple kept the legacy Lightning and even brought back Magsafe (and if it only were to milk the cashcow).

I don’t quite understand this line. Are they talking about Lightning or MagSafe with the parenthetical? MagSafe specifically is something users were begging them to bring back and they did it without removing USB-C charging (best of both worlds).

S3 is one of the sleep states (various levels of sleep S1 to S4) . S5 is full shutdown . https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k...

I see S3 as another victim of the enforced convergence of PC and mobile that MS did get into with Windows 8.

On paper modernizing S3 made even sense since getting all the system components to work nicely with S3 is not an easy task. What wasn't thought off is that handling the same task in modern standby generally isn't easier.

I don't get why the author blames bad drivers on the standby mode. I remember similar issues with S3 back then. You had to jump through many hoops on FreeBSD and Linux to make it work without draining your battery while still being able to resume from standby successfully. Disabling some drivers, but not others, etc.

Thus, a faulty implementation of a device or driver is not to blame on the standby mode. FWIW, Modern Standby works fine on my Thinkpad X1 Titanium Yoga with Windows 11. The only device that drains more battery than necessary if not disabled is the Qualcomm WWAN modem. That stops once you disable it, like in the "good old days". So for me, it's nothing negative, but actually adds convenience because with Modern Standby, my device goes to sleep and resumes much faster than the devices ever did with S3.

Which are those laptops that have the proper S3 sleep support?

I can totally relate. There are some relatively modern processors though that still support the old but gold S3 state. The i5-1240P and i7-1260P processors support these, but not all manufacturers integrate UEFI support for this sleep state. I found that Dasharo offers the ability to switch to S3: https://docs.dasharo.com/dasharo-menu-docs/dasharo-system-fe...

Can relate, try searching "s0ix battery drain".

We've had a have a few issues related to the move to modern sleep - in that "shutdown" is now hibernate (with fast boot enabled) - so any issues that would be fixed with a restart remain.

With some machines, the modern sleep where it stays connected to the network can sometimes cause connection issues that aren't as obvious to the end user.

In a lot of cases we disable fast boot, and disable modern sleep and the problem goes away - but having the ability to select which parts should be enabled and disabled, like how you get the option with PS5's rest mode, would be very useful - especially if controllable by GPO / Intune.

I didn't know S3 vs S0 but this may be the reason why I never keep my laptop in sleep mode and I prefer to put it in hibernate. What about hibernate? Couldn't it be an alternative to the "legacy sleep"?

I didn't seem to have this problem yet so took a look at my recent machines: cat /sys/power/mem_sleep

    starlite mkv 0yo Intel(R) N200, has deep.
    framework0   2yo Intel 12th gen, has deep.
    framework1   1yo AMD Ryzen 5, lacking deep!

That explains it—I haven't really taken the last one out of the house yet.

So what can we do about this? Can we start a class action lawsuit for breaking the PC? Probably too late to return the AMD.

Finally I recommend calling S0ix/s2idle nap, and leave s3 as sleep.

I remember the same kind of annoyances already in 2009 with Windows (Vista!). It's one of the reasons that made me switch to Mac without any regret. Nothing seems to have changed in 15 years.

I got halfway through the article and the font suddenly switched to an unreadable monospace! (Sorry for bikeshedding but it was a uniquely bemusing experience.)

Windows has too much desktop legacy, it's not built for mobile devices. Windows laptops are portable desktops that should never leave the outlet.

“Your computer should be able to allow for the usage of Cortana and receive Windows Updates during Sleep mode, among other features.”

Sounds like a nightmare!

I noticed my laptops kept turning themselves on and sitting at login screen during sleep. Several brands. This is apparently a feature?

Given how little I use my Windows 10 laptop these days, I just turn it off off when I'm not using it. It seems to stay that way.

Can very much relate have an Linux XPS 9570 myself and sleep states are a mess especially in conjunction with power saving tools. Did as much as I could to decrease boot time and shut down of most of the times.

Now I have an M2 Apple and it’s like a day and night difference. Close the lid works exactly how it should work. I maybe did shutdown the Mac onces.

I’m hopeful that ARM based laptops will have better power management on Linux. Totally agree with what you have written. Ironically though, Microsoft standby sucks on Linux and Windows. Happy to be running a Mac.

I’m curious how well Asahi linux works with standby on a Apple Silicon Mac.

S3 basically killed a perfectly good Dell XPS 15 a few years ago. The fan would never stop running.

Oh yeah, I've spent many hours on DELLs trying to solve S0ix sleep states... What a pain in the butt that is. There are few major pain points:

1) Every component has to be in the right "state of mind" in order for Si0x sleep to work properly. Do you have shitty NVMe that has buggy PCI powersaving? Too bad, battery will drain 10%/hour. Your yubikey keeps USB bus by constantly sending interrupts? Ha, enjoy your new backpack heater and watch out for fires...

2) It is extremely hard to debug these issues. I've figure out the yubikey and few things, but some of them are esoterical! ifconfig eth0 down = some part of Intel AMT stops sleeping and is now fully on all the time. Why? Because fck you, that's why. If you want to get some debug info, you can get some very cryptic state-flags for (some) components and you really have to guess what these really are - there is no documentation unfortunately.

3) UEFI is a mess - one would say that you want critical component, such as BIOS/boot chain to be as simple as possible and not* to be extensible in nature - because if some malicious code manages to get in the UEFI modules, you are simply hosed. But the other problem is that UEFI provides quite a lot of interfaces through ACPI and ACPI tables are buggy as hell. I had to patch DELL's DSDT tables in order to get back "deep" sleep - unfortunately it stopped working some time ago as they must have changed something somewehere and the computer would not wake up anymore... It is impossible to debug (or rather it is a royal pain to debug).

Anyone have a suggestion, how it would be possible to schedule an overnight backup on a Windows 11 laptop with Modern Standby? This used to be possible using the task scheduler, but that doesn't seem to work anymore.

This has frustrated me too. I've completely avoided using sleep these days, and instead use hibernate.

Bizarrely, Microsoft also wants to hide this option from you too. But it still exists and modern SSDs are extremely fast.

Tangential but I found it amusing: today Windows rebooted while encrypting my disk with BitLocker, and decided that now would be a great time to retry those updates that bricked the laptop last time...

Had the backpack problem for some time... my current fix is a bash script that goes

while true; do pm-suspend; sleep 12; done

I just ctrl-c it when i need to use it and then restart it when i am done. Dirty but it works..

One aspect I've yet to see covered is how existing hardware doesn't seem to be designed for s0ix to work as intended anyway.

For example, on mobile phones it used to be the case that the application processor wasn't actually the main processor of the phone, it was actually the baseband, and relatedly, this meant that the application processor could be shutdown and woken up when the phone received a text message or phone call. Similarly, modern arm processors have a big/little configuration where you can switch to the efficiency cores when the system is asleep.

While I'm aware that at some point intel started offering efficiency cores, the vast majority of devices that run windows, AFAIK, don't have any way of being awake in sleep mode other that just leaving the CPU running with the screen off.

Maybe s0ix will make more sense as big.LITTLE and other secondary CPU schemes become common, but today seems like it's just upsetting existing users for no apparent gain

1. I'm even surprised that in the 21st century, personal computers (even in iPhone form!) still need to "boot" their operating system (not so: coffee maker, washing machine, TV).

This is bad UX, loses productivity (users waiting for the machines to fire up), and appears to be a relic - ancient machines needed it and then it was perhaps never questions.

2. For desktop PCs, it's not a problem if wake-up time is a bit slow, but laptops should be up instantly (<4s).

> Apples move to force USB-C on everyone

It wasn’t Apple move. They were forced with possibility to loose whole EU market if they don’t.

Last time I didn't have video tearing on Linux was on Ubuntu 8.04 (in 2008, I think on Intel i810)

It's one of the main reasons, together with battery life, I went from Linux laptops to a Macbook.

It's just futile to to get any kind of sleep working on Windows laptop. An alternative strategy is to just shut it down for long breaks, and keep it working for short breaks ("closing lid does nothing" setting), and that's it. Maybe you will be loosing a few minutes per YEAR waiting for boot, which is nothing compared to hours trying to get sleep working.

i have debloated my windows 10 system. i only use it for gaming and some work stuff. there is youtuber named chris titus tech who explains in detail how to have a debloated windows and also how to debload the graphics card.

I have never opened up my laptop thinking: oh I wish my new emails were already there.

Annoyingly when I enable S3 on my P1 Gen 5 Windows 11 give me a whole bunch of warnings in the security center.

Seems like S3 itself is incompatible with some modern firmware protections.

But frankly, I don't care whether it's S0 or S3. I just want it to sleep, and I don't want the OS to NOT offer me the options to say 'don't do stuff in sleep mode'

this is one of the reasons I've always preferred Hybernate over sleep.

More reliable even if it does take just a little longer.

TIL many people share my suffering.

Oh, come on. S0ix is fine. If we don't want things to happen during this kind of sleep, we should arrange at the OS level for them not to happen. Nothing about the underlying mechanism forces your OS, at a policy level, to go download cat pictures and software updates while your machine is asleep.

This post reminds me of the people who complained about the transition from APM to ACPI. Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth about "Why can't my laptop just support nice simple APM? Why do I bother with ACPI?", ACPI won, and we're all better off for it.