Basically every laptop I’ve owned I’ve had to disable sleep when the lid is closed as I often leave them plugged in and want background tasks like downloads or updates to be able to run while I’m not using the machine. However, I don’t think PC laptops have a way to switch to a super low power state and just run background tasks like downloads, alarms and notifications or running scheduled tasks without just being left on in regular power mode. Why is this not just a default feature of laptops, given that phones and tablets have been doing this kind of thing for the last decade or more?
Does anyone know if there are plans to make power management for laptops allow for running certain tasks in Windows or Linux in the future? My smug Apple using friend tells me his Macbook already does this, but is the lack of this feature on PCs software related or something innate to x86 vs ARM architecture?
It should also be noted that many, many laptops struggle to stay asleep during modern standby. If you’ve had a relatively recent laptop suddenly wake up in your backpack and overheat itself, it’s probably some driver or application not taking modern standby into account and keeping the device active for no reason.
This is quite problematic for various brands, and it’s why many people want s3 sleep back.
As for updates, I think they could be done better in this method. Intel and ARM CPUs all use big.LITTLE style designs with slow, low power cores and fast, energy sucking cores. I think you could run an efficiency core for quite a while without wasting too much battery if you’re just applying updates. You’ll need to produce the update in a simple format (no or very fast decompression, quick block level diffs with few conditional operations) but at about or even less than 5W per core, you could let even a laptop passively soak up heat for quite a while before it becomes noticeable, especially when you take three or four minutes to apply an update. Not running the video card and the power hungry CPU cores could save you quite a lot of power compared to installing updates in a normal state.
Microsoft has been trying to tackle that bear for years. In some cases, making sure to pull your power for a minute before you close the lid seems to solve the issue. Supposedly s0 is supposed to be nixed if you’re on battery, but the code that checks battery doesn’t always get called from s0.