I find it hard to believe that, outside of work computers, many people would be choosing Windows over Mac or Linux, especially is AI is their goal.
I’m also curious why the comments are turned off for this article unless it is a paid ad for Microsoft.
I will never use a Windows laptop because it wakes up in the middle of the night to apply some stupid update, then glitches out, and can’t go back to sleep. So every morning I find a laptop with a dead battery. Sometimes if I wake up early, it’ll still be hot from whatever it was doing.
Fixing that stupid bug should have been easier than porting the whole OS and app stack and emulator to a new CPU arch. And I have no faith they fixed the bug anyway, so it’ll probably still happen to ARM models. So no thank you.
There was a video on LTT about this. From what I remember the conclusion was that if you shut down the laptop while connected to power, it remembers the fact and wakes up in the middle of the night to apply updates and shut down again, assuming the power cable will remain connected so there wouldn’t be an impact on the battery. But of course, most people (I think) disconnect the power cable once the laptop is shut down. Windows still wakes up, sees the power cable disconnected, and goes ‘oh well’ and proceeds to update anyway.
It’s also that “Shutdown” doesn’t shut the computer down. It puts it into a sleep mode so it will “boot” faster next time
The hibernation mode has more wake up sources than if it was actually off
I haven’t had the same experience.
For me, it was wake on LAN that Windows just kept sucking at. Leave the computer, it goes to sleep. Wake up the next morning, head into my office, computer is wide fucking awake and the whole room is warm…
For those who unfortunately have to use Windows laptops for work, there is a workaround. Unplug the laptop before putting it to sleep/hibernate. That’s it. Super irritating they won’t fix it, but not surprising, too busy trying to shove (more) ads into the start menu.
It’s actually astounding, how weirdly unmaintained Windows is in many areas. Just look at the settings chaos. There are three completely different settings trees, and at least for me, it’s impossible to know which one to choose for a given task.
There’s constantly stuff going on in the background for no reason and updates take forever and require 7 reboots. That’s not okay.
ShutUp10 helps a bit. It puts a ton of settings in one place for you.
SSDs boot fast enough that I just hard shut down windows at night whenever I have to boot into it – usually for games, since all my non-vr games run on Linux but I have a Quest 2, and Linux support for those is Incredibly sketchy.
It can’t wake from sleep/hibernation if it’s fully powered off and there’s no windows code running to wake it.
For anyone wondering what the issues with sleep in windows are, the problem is that instead of using traditional S3 sleep (suspend to RAM) Microsoft has been pushing hard for “Modern Standby” where insted of only the RAM being powered the whole system is powered on and kept in a low power mode.
In theory this can provide a shorted wake time (because apparently the approx 5 seconds provided by S3 sleep isn’t good enough). The problem is that Windows will sometimes wake up to do maintenance and drain your battery.
You might be able to fix it by disabling Modern Standby (also called S0ix, Connected Standby and S2Idle)in your BIOS. Unfortunetly a lot of modern BIOSes no longer offer the option to disable it and even sometimes lack support for traditional S3 sleep.