I had Opus debug my laptop restarts. It pulled down windebug and pointed out the two drivers that were causing a problem.
One of them was an HDMI audio driver, which wasn't completely a surprise given I connect to a KVM and I imagine something was weird about the connection (and I don't listen to audio through my monitor anyway)
The other was the realtek/intel driver for audio as well? (updated those) Never have had a problem again. Felt pretty good. Windows laptops are pretty awful about coming out of power save, but works like a champ now.
Lenovo p16gen1. Dealing with warranty for 3 months, got replaced with p16gen2 that has same issues, but I'd like to use a computer, not having it at service all the time. Modern standby is just what it really sounds. Modern - completely broken.
I've been having weird troubles with MediaTek MT7922 chip on Linux also, where sometimes Bluetooth would just die and will not recover until reboot. After researching the situation with agents, the conclusion seems to be that the firmware is buggy (which is a proprietary blob, so only MediaTek can fix it). There was a workaround - disable low-power/sleep state for this adapter - which helps, but is not great for a laptop (since it increases power drain).
And generally, if you check online, you'll see plenty of reports about problems with MediaTek. I've learned my lesson - just avoid MediaTek in general. Intel adapters seem much less problematic and better supported overall.
This is also a reminder to not compare Macs with windows laptop as there is no such thing as "windows laptop" instead there are many different types of windows laptops with different hardware components with their own firmware and drivers developed by the different companies and a driver/firmware update from any of these companies can cause all sort of issues.
Asus support just couldn’t help or didn’t care. They blamed the fact that I’d upgraded the RAM because it was easier to blame that than their one shitty component driver.
The worst thing was that because the notebook doesn’t shut down as expected it suddenly becomes a fire risk. I put mine in a laptop sleeve in a cupboard and it when into this loop, refused to shut down and got hotter and hotter. By the time I noticed it, it was literally smoking.
I switched to a Dell XPS15. It’s not without its issues either.
I also have an Asus laptop with sleep issues. Different sleep issues I suspect... A 10ish year old Q535UD (aka Zenbook Flip 15 I think). Mine has an issue going into sleep: it goes dark and inactive, but instead of powering down, it actually powers up and starts getting warm. Only solution is to hold the power button and do a hard reboot. It’s a different WiFi device than the article’s laptop, but could be a related issue. I’ll probably never know as I had to eventually remove the battery for safety reasons, so now I use hibernation. No issues with that.
I have an Asus Vivobook with the same mediatek chip and it does something similar on Linux. I've got it set up to literally unload the WiFi driver after a sleep or shutdown command
I had a similar issue with an HP Omen gaming rig I have. Fix was the same as the article but I put up with it for years.
Sometimes I would investigate but the monotony of tracing things in the Event Viewer and analysis was too much for my ADHD-addled brain. Enter Claude CLI and working through it with prompts plus allowing Claude to execute PowerShell to diagnose was painless and resolved the problem.
I’m all for convenience but not intentionally writing hours of work to disk before closing the lid (which you already know can be janky) is wild to me.
I had a compaq laptop which worked fine until I got a dock, updated windows and after that, XP would only work properly while docked. The dock had a lot more devices, and obviously drivers were causing problems. But corporate had locked down the machine and I had to live with it until I was upgraded to a Thinkpad.
Not only ASUS: the brand-new Lenovo Thinkbook that my IT department got me is having a similar issue: after sleep, no more keyboard. Even an external one fails to generate keystrokes. You are left with the virtual keyboard or Teamviewer.
As a Mac user, I thought this could not exist. I mean, it is 2026 and a PC still does not have a decent collection of keyboard drivers.
I've had the same problem on generation after generation of Lenovo X1's...out of the box, the laptops always crash sometime after entry to sleep. It's inevitably the (Intel) wifi driver + modern standby, and it can be quite subtle to track down.
On my current iteration (Lenovo P1 with Intel AX211), the failure also requires some other device to try to talk to the laptop while it's being put to sleep. Anecdotally sleep tends to fail harder/more often on public networks, perhaps because there's more adversarial traffic scanning computers and waking the device up.
In the end, I really don't even understand why anyone would want their wifi driver responding to network packets when the device is asleep - given that these chips have DMA access via PCI to host memory (unless the IOMMU is configured, which is not a given) - this feature is equivalent to a persistent, always-on remote back door into your RAM, even when your machine is "off". Of course this requires an exploitable CVE in your wifi stack, but there is a constant stream of CVEs and obscure "remote management features", at least in the Intel drivers.
My solution in the end has been to just remove the wifi module from the motherboard (or in cases when it's soldered down, disable the driver by deleting it entirely) and then use an external USB wifi dongle. It's been almost a year now and no sleep issues, no more randomly heating up my backpack, and in public environments like e.g. hotels I don't worry as much because I unplug the wifi card from the laptop when I'm done with it. I had to go with the nuclear option because some updater somewhere is pretty eager about discovering the presence of the wifi device and "helpfully" re-enabling it, I suspect it's the Lenovo Vantage tool.
The external USB device is slightly inconvenient but at least I don't get woken up in the middle of the night by my laptop fan spinning up mysteriously anymore (OK not entirely true, the malware scan will trigger at night and spin up the fans but at least I know what's causing that...).
Thank you thank you thank you. Op and Diallo. I traced it to event 1033 but could not make head way any further. I ended up just disabling sleep entirely which did not help my electric bill when I could not shut down! Edit this worked on my desktop for further context.
I question the wisdom of "Modern Standby." When I put my laptop in sleep mode, I want it to sleep. I don't want it to be using the network, checking for updates, fetching email, etc. It can do all of those things when I wake it up.
All of the hotbagging nonsense where a laptop cooks itself in a bag seems to be caused by Windows trying to be clever and deciding there's some really important stuff it needs to do, so it wakes up the machine, does a bunch of stuff, and doesn't get back to sleep.
Windows, you're not as clever as you think you are. None of this work is urgent. Just stay asleep until I wake you up. Seriously, just don't.
Yes, that is so true. Sleep should mean sleep with both eyes closed! not nightwatch.
But Windows isn't the only one to blame. Macbooks do the same (they're less bad because they boot so fast, turning them off completely isn't that painful).
My macbook would do something similar. It didn't get as hot, but if I left the wrong program open (Outlook), the battery would be around 5% when I took it out of the bag. If I made sure to close everything, sleep was pretty efficient. That was many years ago, maybe things got better.
"Modern Standby" is something that makes your laptop act like a phone. In my view, its only real purpose is to plausibly collect sensor data—just like a phone, or like all those "smart" speakers and "smart" TVs. The data itself has potential buyers and interested parties; it's a well-developed industry chain, and it's even subsidized by users paying for the devices themselves.
Microsoft is to blame for this mess. Everything was ok before their “modern sleep” - C-states and stuff. Everything except memory sleeps. But no, they wanted to be like Apple. And, as always, they did it in most horrible way.
One day, humanity will ask AI one too many questions about laptop with broken power management, and it will realize that it can instead start a global thermonuclear war, and that way it will never have to deal with broken laptops any more.
... and that would be the day humanity knows AGI was achieved.
It's one of the reasons Microslop have been pushing Windows for ARM, only for them to discover that ARM doesn't actually solve this problem. It's less likely to cause problems just because there are less Windows ARM devices out there, with less variety and thus more consistency, but the underlying problem of drivers and other BS being able to block sleep and Windows not being able to handle it is unsolved. Heck, sleep working just fine on x86 Macbooks should have told them that.
Even worse is the fact that support for S3 sleep is going away, so if that did work for you, you'll be pushed over to using S0 sleep, which also doesn't actually solve this problem to any significant degree.
Going by the article, Asus clearly don't. Given the stories floating around about the others, I doubt they have it too, except maybe Lenovo on Thinkpads and the like, although they too aren't immune from problems that really should be caught in QC.
I have the same symptoms on my work PC (HP Probook) but can't apply the fix due to not having admin rights on the machine! ;-(
I had Opus debug my laptop restarts. It pulled down windebug and pointed out the two drivers that were causing a problem.
One of them was an HDMI audio driver, which wasn't completely a surprise given I connect to a KVM and I imagine something was weird about the connection (and I don't listen to audio through my monitor anyway)
The other was the realtek/intel driver for audio as well? (updated those) Never have had a problem again. Felt pretty good. Windows laptops are pretty awful about coming out of power save, but works like a champ now.
Lenovo p16gen1. Dealing with warranty for 3 months, got replaced with p16gen2 that has same issues, but I'd like to use a computer, not having it at service all the time. Modern standby is just what it really sounds. Modern - completely broken.
I've been having weird troubles with MediaTek MT7922 chip on Linux also, where sometimes Bluetooth would just die and will not recover until reboot. After researching the situation with agents, the conclusion seems to be that the firmware is buggy (which is a proprietary blob, so only MediaTek can fix it). There was a workaround - disable low-power/sleep state for this adapter - which helps, but is not great for a laptop (since it increases power drain).
And generally, if you check online, you'll see plenty of reports about problems with MediaTek. I've learned my lesson - just avoid MediaTek in general. Intel adapters seem much less problematic and better supported overall.
Mediatek modem firmwares can be fully reversed.
This was recently demonstrated by this ultra wide range receiver hack which directly sampled the data from the modem ADCs.
The ultimate solution would be a fixed MT7922 driver, but try as I might, I haven't been able to find one online.
Perhaps it's time to ask an LLM of your choice to make one.
This is also a reminder to not compare Macs with windows laptop as there is no such thing as "windows laptop" instead there are many different types of windows laptops with different hardware components with their own firmware and drivers developed by the different companies and a driver/firmware update from any of these companies can cause all sort of issues.
Thank you.
I replaced my Asus just because of this problem.
Asus support just couldn’t help or didn’t care. They blamed the fact that I’d upgraded the RAM because it was easier to blame that than their one shitty component driver.
The worst thing was that because the notebook doesn’t shut down as expected it suddenly becomes a fire risk. I put mine in a laptop sleeve in a cupboard and it when into this loop, refused to shut down and got hotter and hotter. By the time I noticed it, it was literally smoking.
I switched to a Dell XPS15. It’s not without its issues either.
I also have an Asus laptop with sleep issues. Different sleep issues I suspect... A 10ish year old Q535UD (aka Zenbook Flip 15 I think). Mine has an issue going into sleep: it goes dark and inactive, but instead of powering down, it actually powers up and starts getting warm. Only solution is to hold the power button and do a hard reboot. It’s a different WiFi device than the article’s laptop, but could be a related issue. I’ll probably never know as I had to eventually remove the battery for safety reasons, so now I use hibernation. No issues with that.
I swear most laptop sleep problems relate to wifi powersaving :(
(I also thought S0ix was supposed to fix all of this ...)
I have an Asus Vivobook with the same mediatek chip and it does something similar on Linux. I've got it set up to literally unload the WiFi driver after a sleep or shutdown command
I had a similar issue with an HP Omen gaming rig I have. Fix was the same as the article but I put up with it for years.
Sometimes I would investigate but the monotony of tracing things in the Event Viewer and analysis was too much for my ADHD-addled brain. Enter Claude CLI and working through it with prompts plus allowing Claude to execute PowerShell to diagnose was painless and resolved the problem.
"I would work on projects for hours on end and close the lid when I was done."
Yeah... maybe it's because i'm a video gamer, but i always save and save often.
If you can live without it, remove as much energy savings as possible on a laptop. It saves you from lots of troubles.
I’m all for convenience but not intentionally writing hours of work to disk before closing the lid (which you already know can be janky) is wild to me.
I think this is more about workspace state, not saving working data to disk.
I had a compaq laptop which worked fine until I got a dock, updated windows and after that, XP would only work properly while docked. The dock had a lot more devices, and obviously drivers were causing problems. But corporate had locked down the machine and I had to live with it until I was upgraded to a Thinkpad.
Not only ASUS: the brand-new Lenovo Thinkbook that my IT department got me is having a similar issue: after sleep, no more keyboard. Even an external one fails to generate keystrokes. You are left with the virtual keyboard or Teamviewer.
As a Mac user, I thought this could not exist. I mean, it is 2026 and a PC still does not have a decent collection of keyboard drivers.
I've had the same problem on generation after generation of Lenovo X1's...out of the box, the laptops always crash sometime after entry to sleep. It's inevitably the (Intel) wifi driver + modern standby, and it can be quite subtle to track down.
On my current iteration (Lenovo P1 with Intel AX211), the failure also requires some other device to try to talk to the laptop while it's being put to sleep. Anecdotally sleep tends to fail harder/more often on public networks, perhaps because there's more adversarial traffic scanning computers and waking the device up.
In the end, I really don't even understand why anyone would want their wifi driver responding to network packets when the device is asleep - given that these chips have DMA access via PCI to host memory (unless the IOMMU is configured, which is not a given) - this feature is equivalent to a persistent, always-on remote back door into your RAM, even when your machine is "off". Of course this requires an exploitable CVE in your wifi stack, but there is a constant stream of CVEs and obscure "remote management features", at least in the Intel drivers.
My solution in the end has been to just remove the wifi module from the motherboard (or in cases when it's soldered down, disable the driver by deleting it entirely) and then use an external USB wifi dongle. It's been almost a year now and no sleep issues, no more randomly heating up my backpack, and in public environments like e.g. hotels I don't worry as much because I unplug the wifi card from the laptop when I'm done with it. I had to go with the nuclear option because some updater somewhere is pretty eager about discovering the presence of the wifi device and "helpfully" re-enabling it, I suspect it's the Lenovo Vantage tool.
The external USB device is slightly inconvenient but at least I don't get woken up in the middle of the night by my laptop fan spinning up mysteriously anymore (OK not entirely true, the malware scan will trigger at night and spin up the fans but at least I know what's causing that...).
Thank you thank you thank you. Op and Diallo. I traced it to event 1033 but could not make head way any further. I ended up just disabling sleep entirely which did not help my electric bill when I could not shut down! Edit this worked on my desktop for further context.
Fucking hell!
40+ years of laptop computing and sleep is still a problem !!!
I question the wisdom of "Modern Standby." When I put my laptop in sleep mode, I want it to sleep. I don't want it to be using the network, checking for updates, fetching email, etc. It can do all of those things when I wake it up.
All of the hotbagging nonsense where a laptop cooks itself in a bag seems to be caused by Windows trying to be clever and deciding there's some really important stuff it needs to do, so it wakes up the machine, does a bunch of stuff, and doesn't get back to sleep.
Windows, you're not as clever as you think you are. None of this work is urgent. Just stay asleep until I wake you up. Seriously, just don't.
Yes, that is so true. Sleep should mean sleep with both eyes closed! not nightwatch.
But Windows isn't the only one to blame. Macbooks do the same (they're less bad because they boot so fast, turning them off completely isn't that painful).
My macbook would do something similar. It didn't get as hot, but if I left the wrong program open (Outlook), the battery would be around 5% when I took it out of the bag. If I made sure to close everything, sleep was pretty efficient. That was many years ago, maybe things got better.
There is a setting on Macs to allow the laptop to wake-up sporadically to update opened apps during sleep. You can totally disable that.
"Modern Standby" is something that makes your laptop act like a phone. In my view, its only real purpose is to plausibly collect sensor data—just like a phone, or like all those "smart" speakers and "smart" TVs. The data itself has potential buyers and interested parties; it's a well-developed industry chain, and it's even subsidized by users paying for the devices themselves.
Microsoft is to blame for this mess. Everything was ok before their “modern sleep” - C-states and stuff. Everything except memory sleeps. But no, they wanted to be like Apple. And, as always, they did it in most horrible way.
I have put my MacBook Air to sleep by closing the lid thousands of times for more than a decade now without a problem.
The marketing tries to tell us that we're on the brink of AGI, but still in 2026 putting a random laptop reliably to sleep remains an open problem.
I bet if they had pointed an AI at the problem it would have solved it much quicker than 3 years!
One day, humanity will ask AI one too many questions about laptop with broken power management, and it will realize that it can instead start a global thermonuclear war, and that way it will never have to deal with broken laptops any more.
... and that would be the day humanity knows AGI was achieved.
https://www.savagechickens.com/2026/10/imagining-the-future....
Wow, as a MacBook user for the last decade I had thought the rest of technology would have caught up by now with such a basic feature. Embarrassing
It's one of the reasons Microslop have been pushing Windows for ARM, only for them to discover that ARM doesn't actually solve this problem. It's less likely to cause problems just because there are less Windows ARM devices out there, with less variety and thus more consistency, but the underlying problem of drivers and other BS being able to block sleep and Windows not being able to handle it is unsolved. Heck, sleep working just fine on x86 Macbooks should have told them that.
Even worse is the fact that support for S3 sleep is going away, so if that did work for you, you'll be pushed over to using S0 sleep, which also doesn't actually solve this problem to any significant degree.
Can’t guarantee quality when you have a billion hardware permutations.
What about vendors like Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo? Don't they have any QC?
Going by the article, Asus clearly don't. Given the stories floating around about the others, I doubt they have it too, except maybe Lenovo on Thinkpads and the like, although they too aren't immune from problems that really should be caught in QC.
Which vendor has a billion hardware permutations ?