Modern Standby.......what a pain it is!!!

Windows 11 Pro - 21H2 (Build 22000.918)

Hi guy’s I’m new here and thought my first post would be a rant on the titled ‘Modern Standby’ and the pain its been since I purchased my new laptop about a month or so ago now. I got me a nice ASUS Zenbook Pro Space Edition and its been brilliant to use…..until I started using it with my new docking station.

**Long post ahead**
I got a brand new Plugable TBT3-UDZ docking station with my laptop. When I first plugged it in, the laptop rapidly jumped between battery power and mains power loads of times before it would seem to settle down. Despite this, I would then be plagued with what I can only describe as a ‘blip’ where my external screen would go blank, I would hear the laptop beep as it would change over onto battery, then beep again as it re-registered the dock and hopped back onto mains power. I would have periods of stability where I could operate for an hour or two, and then have a blip.

I contacted Plugable support and they very kindly sent me the latest firmware for the dock. There was a minor improvement seemingly, but the laptop would still go crazy every time it was first hooked up to the dock. I wondered if it was a faulty Thunderbolt cable – the dock is TB3 and the ports on this new ASUS are TB4. I had done my homework beforehand, and was confident the two are completely interchangeable so the TB3 dock should happily work through the laptops TB4 ports regardless. With the problems continuing, Plugable then sent me a completely brand new dock replacement under warranty. I plugged it in, and it worked. No crazy flipping back and forth between battery power and mains like on the old dock. So, the good news is that I now have much more stability – there must have been something faulty on the old dock or something.

Anyway, despite the much-improved situation I am noticing in the logs occasionally and frustratingly that the laptop will enter ‘Modern Standby’ of its own volition, regardless of my power settings. Tonight for example I plugged the dock in and ten minutes later it tried to enter Modern Standby entirely on its own and I had to move the mouse/keyboard to wake it again – right in the middle of a YouTube video.

Now if the last week on the new dock is any indicator, it should now stabilise and will be fine, at least until I unplug it from the dock and plug it back in later. I’ve read numerous reports of people having issues with modern standby not sleeping their laptops properly, and people finding their laptops overheating in bags or having the battery drained. For me, it’s a different scenario. When the laptop isn’t running on the dock, there are no issues whatsoever, it runs flawlessly. But, when it’s introduced to a dock, the whole Modern Standby thing goes a little crazy and does its own thing for a while. I’ve read a number of tutorials on how to turn modern standby off but that seems to have made things worse for me – one suggestion with a registry entry (creating PlatformAoAcOverride key) caused the laptop to simply enter standby, on the dot every 10 minutes regardless of the power settings and regardless of what I was doing. I had about 1 hour stability before it just started doing this, so I’ve re-enabled modern standby to my chagrin!

I apologise for the long post but I felt like a vent. I can’t see a way around this and it seems to be something I’ll just have to battle on through. I am starting to wonder if maybe this docking station (ie this brand/model) perhaps just doesn’t play well with the laptop? But for the moment I have no other docks I can try.



If you’ve made it this far, then thank you for reading

Matchwood

A brief update - its just done it again.

Event log shows the following:

Source Kernel-Power

The system is entering Modern Standby

Reason: AC/DC Display Burst Suppressed.

Then it says

Source Kernel-Power
The system is exiting Modern Standby
Reason: Input Mouse


I had obviously moved the mouse to bring it out of standby. I'm not sure what AC/DC Display Burst Suppressed event means - is it something to do with the mains power on the external screen I'm using? Is it confusing the system somehow?

A few of us have been posting in another thread today about the woes of modern standby. Not all new laptops have bios that allow for modern standby to be disabled but a few do.
Open a command prompt as administrator and type powercfg -a and make yourself a screenshot of it. This tells you all the sleep states available to you.

If you want to try to disable modern standby you can try the registry change or bat file in this tutorial to see if you may be one of the lucky ones whose laptop allows it. Disable Modern Standby in Windows 10 and Windows 11 Tutorial

After making the change restart the computer and run another powercfg -a It should tell you if S3 sleep is available. If it is, in power options turn off fast startup.

Don't be surprised if it does not work. Fingers crossed for you.

Just another update on this posting - I figured it might help anyone else, but it never hurts to be aware. I turned off last week the Fast Start Up which is enabled by default. I had read up that Fast Start Up means when you 'shut down' Windows, it doesn't actually shut down, despite the appearance of doing so. All it does is put the Windows Kernel in a low power state, which then quickly reloads everything when you turn the machine back 'on' - that's how it achieves the quicker boot times.

I have had a week of complete stability. No blips, no random attempts by the machine to enter into standby. Its gone into standby as configured after 30 mins or so when I'm away from the desk, with the screen going off after 10. An hour ago, I turned fast start up back on. Chaos ensued. The machine constantly blipping every 10 minutes when trying to enter into standby automatically while hooked up to the docking station. I couldn't get anything done.

I turned Fast Start Up off, and shut the machine down. Unplugged the dock from the power and cycled it. Powered it back on, turned the laptop on. Not a single blip of trouble. Now in the article I read, Windows Update problems with them not installing are quite often now attributed to the Fast Start Up since its enabled by default. It causes some issue for updates if the Kernel of the OS isn't properly loaded. Restarting the machine properly resets the Kernel.

I'm going to keep watch on it, but the results of the last week and the little test I did earlier - its making me think my issues could be tied to fast start up.

Matchwood said:

I turned off last week the Fast Start Up which is enabled by default. I had read up that Fast Start Up means when you 'shut down' Windows, it doesn't actually shut down, despite the appearance of doing so. All it does is put the Windows Kernel in a low power state, which then quickly reloads...

Click to expand...

In effect, yes. It's a form of hibernation. Unlike a low power state it can survive without power, like removing a laptop's battery. With Fast Up enabled on Shut Down just the Kernel state is saved to hyberfil.sys. On startup it is reloaded from the hibernation file rather than started up from cold. A Restart is always a full start up from cold.

Bree said:

In effect, yes. It's a form of hibernation. Unlike a low power state it can survive without power, like removing a laptop's battery. With Fast Up enabled on Shut Down just the Kernel state is saved to hyberfil.sys. On startup it is reloaded from the hibernation file rather than started up from cold. A Restart is always a full start up from cold.

Click to expand...

Exactly. I don't know how or why this would effect my laptop's performance with the dock, must be something driver related I can only surmise. But it seems with Fast Start Up turned off........the laptop is behaving itself when plugged into the dock. I can't explain it aha.

Matchwood said:

it seems with Fast Start Up turned off........the laptop is behaving itself when plugged into the dock. I can't explain it aha.

Click to expand...

Even with Windows 10 there were always one or two specific laptop models that behaved 'oddly' with it enabled. With almost everything having SSDs these days there's hardly any benefit to Fast Start Up anyway, it was only really of any benefit on systems with HDDs. I turn it off as a matter of course.

"Fast Startup" is one of those ideas where current loaded hardware drivers and their state is saved as an image to be recalled on fast startup, bypassing lengthy hardware initialisation processes with their individual drivers and fed to hardware "hoping" their state will be exactly reproduced to what it was before shutdown. This does not always work as the theory suggests and is void since SSDs have come into play. Much safer to let your hardware components be correctly initialized after a power cycle.