S0 sleep in Windows 11

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WINDOWS 11 By Ed Tittel Managing sleep and power states can be challenging on Windows PCs. Things can go sideways when it comes to waking up various e
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ibe98765, Norio, AlexEiffel, wmelonman, windbg, rc primak, abbodi86, fisher75, DLivesInTexas, lmacri, Casey S

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Ed,

Very interesting article! I’ve had my problems with power modes on different systems with not being able to get out of Sleep mode.

I thought I’d run a test on my 4 machines and see what is reported and got a few surprises.

• Both my Minis Forum UM790 Pro (Feb. 2024) and my Wife’s Dell 15400 Laptop (Feb. 2020) show S0 is supported! I’ve attached the annotated list for those who are interested.
• The UM790 shows S0 Network Connected while the Dell 15400 shows S0 with Network Disconnected.

Of course, neither of them are Co-Pilot PCs. Also, I have Fast Startup and Hibernate disabled on all of the machines.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Dear RG:
Thanks for sharing your sleep inventory with us. Obviously, my problem is that I don’t have enough new PCs. Because Lenovo is my biggest source, and they came late to the S0 party, it looks like my experience does not reflect the panoply of today’s marketplace.

This is important info for other readers to consider. Interestingly, my “next-newest” PC (a ThinkStation P360) was announced in August 2022 and shipped shortly thereafter. It’s an S3 design, not S0. Go figure!

Irrespective of whether or not a PC is Copilot+ branded or not, newer models — from what I see online, starting in 2020 just like your Dell item — can and sometimes do support S0 sleep states. The best way to tell what you’ve got is to use the powercfg command on your PCs, and see what they tell you.

-Ed=

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Ed,

I noticed that you didn’t explain how the Fast Startup listed as a sleep state on the PowerShell display fits into the scheme of things.

Thanx……Len

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I didn’t think to mention Fast Startup, which combines aspects of shutdown and hibernation. Copilot describes it as “When you shut down your computer with Fast Startup enabled, Windows closes all applications and logs off all users, then saves the system state to a hibernation file.” IMO, that makes it pretty much equivalent to enabling hibernation, then selecting same from the power menu. I’m not sure what else needs to be said. What might you suggest?

-Ed-

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One thing Fast Startup does, is it locks the partition so that it can’t be written to. Linux in a dual-boot configuration which shares even an NTFS data partition with Windows when Fast Startup is enabled, can’t write to the partition, change or delete files from it. It’s not just the Windows System partition which gets locked.

I know this is an edge case scenario, but this is why I always disable Fast Startup in Windows. It doesn’t really make that much difference in boot times.

-- rc primak

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AlexEiffel, satrow

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i don’t like sleep;  i don’t like my machine on.

i prefer hibernate, and turn off fast start.  with newer machines, and going to hibernate, starting it back up is very fast, and more secure;  with sleep, system is still operation al to soome extent.  have to fool with locking, etc.

also, with hibernate, i use mousejiggler.exe, so that if i’m working on it, i can turn on mousejiggler, and hibernate won’t start since machine is active (hibernate after 15 minutes INactivity…)

anyway, just my preferences for more security

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Dear Aoz999:
Lots of people feel as you do, and avoid sleep completely. I used to do that on older Windows PCs (2019 or older) to establish more complete control over the machine. My gut feel is that S0 sleep is supposed to make using sleep more straightforward and palatable. But, as with most things Windows, users’ attitudes and experiences will vary. I totally get where you’re coming from. On my newer PCs with S3 sleep, I will often take the same route you describe. I’m more inclined to use S0 on those machines I have that support it.

Thanks for your comment.

-Ed-

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rc primak

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Here is my powercfg /a

The following sleep states are available on this system:
Standby (S0 Low Power Idle) Network Connected
Hibernate
Fast Startup

The following sleep states are not available on this system:
Standby (S1)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.
This standby state is disabled when S0 low power idle is supported.

Standby (S2)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.
This standby state is disabled when S0 low power idle is supported.

Standby (S3)
The system firmware does not support this standby state.
This standby state is disabled when S0 low power idle is supported.

Hybrid Sleep
Standby (S3) is not available.
The hypervisor does not support this standby state.

My issue is that I am trying to do backups overnight, but it appears that my Win11 Pro 23H2 computer at the very least turns off the wireless nic which prevents the backup from completing. I have not been able to find any information that tells me the setting(s) I have to change to stop my computer from shutting off the nic overnight. Too often it says to go tab in power settings or elsewhere that does not show on my computer.

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Dear Ray Murphy:

This is a case where I’d recommend setting sleep to never, or using something like PowerT0ys Awake to make sure that your PC can do what it needs to during off hours for backup. I’ve read about other users experiencing the same thing — S0 failing to wake the NIC. OTOH, you might want to make sure you’ve enable Wake on LAN (WoL) for the network interface in question (via its Advanced Properties page in Device Manager). I can’t find a tutorial about WoL at AskWoody (but plenty of discussion on that topic), so here’s on from Windows Central.

HTH,

–Ed–

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Ray Murphy, windbg

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I finally got around to dling Power TOys and ran Awake. Now my overnight backup sessions run uninterrupted. Thanks.

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I have a DIY desktop system with a Gigabyte motherboard that only supports S3 and Hybernate. The odd thing is with Hybernate, it acts like is it shutting down, and then immediately reboots from scratch, and with Shutdown it shuts down, and reboots where I left off.  Strange?

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Ed Tittel

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Some research suggested I should disable fast startup, with worked once. But not again.

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Ed Tittel

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Dear Brad Houser:

That IS strange: almost sounds like the reverse of what’s expected. You anticipated my first impulse, which was to recommend disabling Fast Startup. Interesting that it worked only once. If I understand your shutdown description, that sounds OK. So it sounds like hibernate is the real issue.

Looking around online I see that some users with Gigabyte mobos report similar things. Some discussions (e.g. this Super User item) suggest issues with Wake on LAN (WoL). OTOH, my next impulse is to suggest turning off hibernate, rebooting, then turning it back on (use powercfg /hibernate off to turn it off, reboot, then powercfg /hibernate on to turn it back on).

Also, have you tried repairing your Windows image via DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth? That’s what I’d recommend if the enable/disable item fails. Next, either consider an upgrade to 24H2 or a in-place repair install (Settings > System > Recovery > click “Reinstall now” button) to replace the image files for your 23H2 image.

HTH,

–Ed–

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i have had that happen.

i have bitlocker installed.  I have system set to HIBERNATE after inactivity.  If I SHUT DOWN, then RESTART, let system get to happy honky dory state, then the next several  times it becomes inactive, it goes to HIBERNATE, correctly, and turns off.

BUT, then, after several times of restarting from hibernate, it goes into quirky mode of bringing back up teh bitlocker screen, after supposedly going to hibernate.   now, t he advantage of the bitlocker screen is that IT will TIME  OUT after about 30 seconds, and then goes back to its hibernated state.  so i am comfortable that the machine is off.  BUT, if bitlocker is not installed, or encrypted, such as it sounds like your machine, then it goes to the STARTED state and is back on.  I don’t know what does it but i know tha if i go and do a full SHUTDOWN, it fixes it for several days.

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Ed Tittel

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Dear Aoz999:

Weird and wonderful are the occasional foibles of Windows… That’s why I impose a 30-minute time-limit on rabbit hole investigations. Once I hit that time-out, I stop to consider: Do I really want to solve this, or will it be faster and easier to try an in-place upgrade repair install instead? The problem here, of course, is that this approach invariably works with software-related stuff, and not at all with hardware-related stuff. Alas, sleep issues shade over from software into firmware and hardware somewhat to all the way outside Windows’ sphere of influence. Sigh.

–Ed–

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Ed Tittel wrote:

30-minute time-limit on rabbit hole investigations

Ed, But Rabbit Holes are so much fun and you often learn so much in the process. Glad I’m retired so I don’t have to worry about the time I spend with the CAT 8-))

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Dear RG:

Indeed, Windows is my preferred source for rabbit holes and the endless entertainment they bring. I ran into something along those lines yesterday when I found myself unable to get the BIOS updated on an otherwise very nice SFF mini-PC. I think it’s what keeps us going, as “aspiring technology codgers!”

As always thanks for your comments and perspectives.

=Ed=

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After owning a couple HP desktop PCs that work flawlessly with S3, I received a new HP desktop PC in the Fall of ’22 that utilized S0.  S3 works so perfectly for my older HP PCs that I was shocked at the new S0 “Modern Standby”, which I considered awful.  I was used to S3 entering standby as soon as asked, but S0 would instead begin running Task Scheduler maintenance tasks – it might take 45 minutes to enter low-power-state “DRIPS” & then restart maintenance tasks again at any time (Microsoft Defender Antivirus scans being a major delay.)  Until I realized what was happening, I wondered “Why isn’t my PC going into Standby!?” or “How long is it going to take for my PC to enter Standby today, if it even does!?”  Then I started keeping tabs on my secondary storage drive, an old-fashioned spinning HDD.  The SMART values were advancing off the charts as the HDD was constantly spun up & spun down as the PC was wakened over & over to do more maintenance tasks.  This HDD was going to be prematurely worn out in months – it already had more statistical “wear” than my S3 PCs HDDs had accumulated in a decade.

I ran ridiculous numbers of “Sleep Study” reports trying to troubleshoot S0 behavior (full of cryptic codes, often with no code-reference to be found anywhere on the internet.)  Eventually I was forced to remove the secondary internal HDD & place it in an external enclosure so that I could control the spin-ups/downs.  Between that & other tweaks I had to make to keep my PC in standby, the machine FINALLY performs in standby as well as my older S3 PCs, with the occasional delay due to Scheduled Tasks that I hadn’t yet tweaked to not run when there’s no internet connection (I can then disable my internet connection prior to standby to avoid “standby maintenance”.)  There is a registry setting that configures a “Network Disconnected” version of S0, but it’s not respected: the system just exits standby to perform connected maintenance and returns to standby afterwards.  This is a very fast PC that can quickly handle most maintenance tasks in the background without breaking a sweat – but takes much longer to run this maintenance in Modern Standby. It’s a shame there isn’t a configurable setting for S0 standby to remain in DRIPS until intentionally woken by a user.

There are registry settings that can alter the PC to S3 standby, but unfortunately HP no longer supports S3 in their more recent PCs’ EUFI/BIOS, so that’s not an option.

Bottom line:  My advice is to never configure a Modern Standby PC with an internal spinning HDD.  I feel bad for laptop owners who additionally have to worry about SO standby causing their batteries to be drained overnight or laptop to overheat if enclosed in a bag.  My experience with Modern Standby is that it might save me a second of “wake time”, at most, compared to S3 standby, and takes much longer to reach a low-power-state (DRIPS) in the first place.  No significant phone-like “instant” perception benefits, just headaches.  I don’t want to even consider all the time I wasted trouble-shooting its behavior.

 

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AlexEiffel, windbg

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Good advice: I don’t use spinning disks much any more, so this is not something I’d run into. Your careful and detailed explanation should be every bit as helpful for other readers as it was for me. Indeed, thanks loads for the heads-up. I resolve to follow your lead and avoid S0 configurations with internal HDDs (mostly I run them in enclosures or caddies myself these days anyway).

Great info, and much appreciated.

–Ed–

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Concerning Fast Startup in a business AD environment, this is a note I took in 2018:
When this is activated, WOL doesn’t work and “Group Policy and preference settings that are targeted during shutdown and startup aren’t applied when users shut down and start up their PCs. Settings are only applied during a reboot.”
Source: <https://www.petri.com/how-to-disable-windows-10-fast-startup-and-why-you-might-want-to>
So I always disable this using GPO with my clients.

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Ed Tittel

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Good advice, especially in shared machine environments like libraries, computer labs, keyboard entry farms, and so forth. Thanks for the Petri link, too: good stuff!

Best wishes & thanks for a good comment.

–Ed–

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That link only works without the “&gt;” on the end.

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Link fixed.

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Personally, I always disable Fast Startup and hibernate.

On my tests done a few years ago, Fast startup was slower on a fast for its time and tweaked by myself machine with a SATA SSD than having it off. Fast Startup sometimes created issues as you don’t really reboot from scratch. I didn’t see any good reason to use it and I preferred to avoid the potential issues.

As for hibernate, although I think maybe it could be useful to put a laptop to sleep when carrying it, I don’t think it is useful for a desktop (I use S3 instead). I almost disable the pagefile on Windows (1GB can be plenty if you have enough memory and no memory leaking apps in the background and I’ve been running with less than 500MB for years on my tweaked PC without issue, but try that at your own risks I don’t have a regular user case scenario). Keeping the pagefile size required to do hibernate (because hibernate writes the state of RAM there, I guess) if you have a good amount of RAM is wasted space, plus I found it seemed to slow down the PC startup too, for a reason I don’t really understand, maybe if there is a big pagefile, the OS preemptively writes more stuff there on startup.

I found that the monitors I like were slower to wake up from sleep than my PC, so S3 was plenty fast in that context.

I also experienced many computers waking up from sleep states other than S3 to do tasks, which I didn’t like at all.

I am also a user of mirrored spinning disks for data so I don’t want to keep going on and off with sleep mode. So, for desktop use, I turn off the screen after a short delay, I press Windows-L to lock my station when leaving it (and it adds additional security) and I wait for the monitor to turn off. At the end of the day, I put the computer to sleep S3 and I reboot once in a while to “clean” it.

Not oversizing a power supply and using a higher tier power supply (Gold or Platinum) also helps not consuming too much power and not heating your house as much (lower tier power supplies are less effective so they emit heat instead of some of the power).

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satrow

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the advantage of hibernate is that the machine is not asleep, it is off.  no power, better security, etc.

and when you restart it, it reloads from memory, the state of the desktop, machine, etc, that you were at when you hibernated it (don’t have to restart the programs, etc.)

anyway,just an observation

 

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AlexEiffel

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Dear AlexEiffel:

thanks for your helpful and informative exposition on Fast Startup and Hibernate. Personally, I tend to favor skipping Fast Startup so I can see the BIOS load-and-go screen output. I’m definitely OK with hibernate, even on desktop systems (of my baker’s dozen PCs, 8 are laptops and 5 desktops).

Appreciate the info and the details.

Thanks again,

–Ed–

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AlexEiffel

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Ed Tittel wrote:

Personally, I tend to favor skipping Fast Startup so I can see the BIOS load-and-go screen output.

Fast Startup in Windows has no effect on display of BIOS Power On Self Test.

That’s controlled by Fast Boot settings in UEFI:

Enable or Disable Fast Boot in UEFI BIOS Firmware Settings in Windows 11

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Dear b:

Sorry, my mixup. Thanks for pointing that out.

Cheers!

–Ed–

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b

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Some additional tips related to Monitor-power standby for Desktop PCs that use S0 Modern Standby:

For my older S3 desktop machines, I like to use a software utility (invoked with a keyboard shortcut) to place the monitor into low-power standby while the PC continues to run operations which don’t require me using the monitor, or if I want to save monitor power without placing the entire PC into low power standby.  (One such utility is Nirsoft’s “nircmd.exe monitor async_off”.)  However, I found that using a utility-induced “Screen Off” state with my Modern Standby PC would cause the entire PC to enter full standby (DRIPS) as soon as the monitor went into standby (also seen in Sleep Study reports as a reason for Transitioning to Sleep.)  This forced me to instead use the monitor’s hardware power button to achieve the monitor-off power savings without going into full system standby, and there are some downsides to that method.

Eventually I learned that if I launched the Windows Media Player (universal platform app, not the old legacy version), and started a song on an endless “Repeat” loop (app volume setting off), the PC would continue to run after utility-induced monitor standby & the only other system hardware to shut down would be the Video subsystem (NVIDIA lights on the vid-card go out & additional power savings register on my UPS power meter – unexpected S0 bonus!)  Everything else continues to run & the monitor & video subsystem properly re-wake with mouse or keyboard use.  Running the Media Player app doesn’t even register as using any measurable CPU on the Task Manager, so you can just keep it running in the background all the time until you want to hit full S0 standby.  (That was how I saved my secondary storage spinning HDD from excessive wear until I finally relegated it to an external enclosure.)  (“SC_MONITORPOWER” is the “Screen Off” entry reason in a Sleep Study report, followed by “Transition To Sleep”, but DRIPS is blocked by the app as an “Activator”.)

Even without the above workaround, oddly, if the monitor goes into standby due to reaching the Windows-configured monitor time-out in the Power Plan, the system doesn’t go into full DRIPS standby, nor does the video subsystem power down – only the monitor reaches low power standby. (“Video Idle Timeout” is the “Screen Off” entry reason in a Sleep Study report, NOT followed by “Transition To Sleep”.)

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AlexEiffel

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Dear rChaz:

Reading over your S3-vs-S0 manuevers, my first thought was “The things we do to make Windows work the way we want it to.” Ingenious. Thanks for sharing. I’m going to have to try this on a couple of mildly balky machines and see how it works for me.

Thanks again,

–Ed–

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Norio

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I’m still on Win10 and only have S3 available.

I run into the nonresponsive PC requiring a cold reboot periodically but not as often as in years past.

My biggest power complaint is that if I don’t physically do a Winkey-L command when I leave my system, the power subsystem will not lock the system.  I can come back at some future time and just hit any key and the screen will get restored w/o a password prompt.

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Click on the Flag / press the Win key.
Settings (cog icon)
Accounts
Sign-in Options
Require sign-in.
Select “When PC wakes from sleep” in the dropdown.

cheers, Paul

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Fred

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Was already set:

Require sign-in
If you’ve been away, when should Windows require you to sign in again?
When PC wakes up from sleep v

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I thought this sounded odd, so I asked Copilot what might be up. It says this could happen because of group policy settings (Sleep settings), registry settings (NoLockScreen set to 0), power options (which I believe you’re talking about in the preceding items) and also — I didn’t know this — Windows Hello (which may be logging you in automatically if active, so you may want to try temporarily disabling same and see if that makes a difference).

 

HTH and thanks for your various comments: ibe98765 and Paul T.

–Ed–

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I don’t use group policy as this is a single system used only by me.  Besides, GP is very convoluted.

I typed “Windows Hello” in the All Settings search box and got taken to “Sign-in options”

Nothing in there except:

Require sign-in
If you’ve been away, when should Windows require you to sign in again?
When PC wakes up from sleep v

You didn’t specify the parent key for “NoLockScreen”, so I did a global search using The fabulous Resplendent Registry Manager app.

This produced hits that didn’t look promising.  The best hit was:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PolicyManager\default\DeviceLock

But I couldn’t tell what device was being referred to.

P.S. Isn’t it swell how Microsoft makes the Windows Setting pages text not copyable?  Is this on purpose or just dumb programming?  Anyway, this is where the PowerToys text copy tool comes in handy.  Thanks Microsoft.

P.P.S Why doesn’t askwoody allow use of text colors?

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Dear ibe98765:

Oops on the regkey. It’s HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Personalization. Should’ve known that NoLockScreen would through multiple hits. Apologies…

I share your irk with MS on making Settings pages non-copyable (you did, however, mention Snipping Tool and PowerToys OCR to “textify”content — works pretty well). As for text colors, the best way to raise that issue is to ask the moderator (editor Will Fastie) to weigh in.

Cheers and thanks for your follow-up.

–Ed–

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“I thought this sounded odd, so I asked Copilot what might be up. It says this could happen because of group policy settings (Sleep settings), registry settings (NoLockScreen set to 0), power options (which I believe you’re talking about in the preceding items) and also — I didn’t know this — Windows Hello (which may be logging you in automatically if active, so you may want to try temporarily disabling same and see if that makes a difference).”

I believe I have solved this problem!  So simple.

I had screen sleep time as 10 minutes and PC sleep time as 30 minutes.  So if I returned between 10 minutes and 30 minutes, hitting a key would restart the monitor but not require a password because the PC hadn’t gone to sleep.  This fooled me into thinking that the system was not locking all the time.

Logically, Microsoft should add a setting that states “lock the PC” when the monitor powers down.  But that would be too easy.

What you have to do is go to the Screen Saver Settings (remember all those funky screen savers we used to use, like ants crawling all over the screen, etc.?) and set THAT to the monitor timeout.  You don’t actually have to have a screen saver running, you can set that to “none”.

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ibe98765 wrote:

if I don’t physically do a Winkey-L command when I leave my system, the power subsystem will not lock the system.

I have to do the same thing on my desktop for the same reason, but it’s become automatic and I like the simplicity.  When I add small but more complex settings and tweaks it’s easy to forget what I’ve done later on. To avoid that I got make notes with clear file names for a search.  Some extra steps are solid and helpful, but others can just become time wasters.

Desktop Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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Indeed TechTango. That is why I, too, try to avoid lots of individual tweaks on Windows PCs — especially production machines. If I *must* tweak on such PCs, I’ll use an all-in-one tool such as WinAero Tweaker to keep everything in one place where it’s also easily visible and manageable. Good comment, thanks!

–Ed–

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TechTango

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