Windows Sleep Debacle

Contempt and Deception

Microsoft, in its infinite 'wisdom', has decided that users cannot be trusted to manage power in their own computers, and has taken power management into its own hands, calling it Modern Standby.

In Windows past, power state was relatively simple—your computer was either fully on, fully off, hibernating (suspended completely to non-volatile storage), or sleeping (suspended with just enough power to retain volatile memory). The advantage of sleep over hibernation is that switching to fully on is near instantaneous (as compared to the time required to read non-volatile storage).

To manage power states, Windows gave you Power Profiles, collections of settings that controlled the power consumption of all elements of the computer. You could easily configure those profiles and switch between them. But Microsoft decided that simple system was too complicated and not fast enough, so it began automating power management, through Fast Boot, Connected Standby, and finally Modern Standby.

The Problem

• Full Sleep Automation. Instead of relying on metrics that were under the control of the user, like the computer actually going idle, Modern Standby fully automates the Sleep process according to simplistic, non-overridable rules rather than actual system behavior.
• The New API. New functionality was added to the Windows API to give software applications a way to signal explicitly that they should not be put to sleep, but that does nothing for software written previously that is still in wide use, a 'solution' that does not really address the problem. As always, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
• Residual UI Deception. But worse, Microsoft did not alter the user interface (UI), leaving in place apparent control over the Sleep process that is actually disconnected from the Sleep automation. Thus Sleep 'Never' no longer means never. This leads to great frustration and waste of time as users try to figure out why they can't control Sleep behavior, the worst sort of insult to users.
• Worse Battery Life. Last but not least, if a system has issues in firmware or drivers, as many systems do, Modern Standby can actually result in substantially worse battery life than former Sleep.

The result of these changes means that you cannot normally run a long legacy compute job (like video encoding) unless you are actually using the computer, because Modern Standby will trigger Sleep if it detects laptop lid closure or user idle (even though your compute job is running), a huge functional regression.

The Solution

Most of the obvious hacks do nothing to solve this problem, but there is at least one effective solution:

• PowerToys Awake. Apparently by use of the new API, PowerToys Awake will keep your computer running as long as you force the display ON. You can lock the screen or close the laptop lid, but you must force the display on, thereby wasting battery power and risking screen burn in. It's not a great solution, but it does work.

Whatever happened to, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?"