Laptop switching off when in sleep mode

JohnB47

Right, I'm like Alice diving down a rabit hole here. I've followed some of the advice given in this thread and by searching the net. I'm now looking at wake sources, in the Event Viewer (by filtering for Power Troubleshooter events). It is telling me that, on a few occasions, at a time when I put the pc into sleep mode, it is recording events like this:
Sleep Time: ‎2021‎-‎02‎-‎15T23:38:28.669122300Z

Wake Time: ‎2021‎-‎02‎-‎15T23:38:28.667065600Z

Wake Source: S4 Doze to Hibernate

So it seems the pc is going asleep, then waking up then hybernating - all at the same instant as I put it to sleep.
I've dived into the advanced power settings and made sure the following is set (I changed some of them):
allow hybrid sleep: off (for both plugged in and battery)
hybernate after/on battery: 120 minutes
hybernate after/plugged in: 840 minutes (this was 180 minutes). I can't seem to set 'never' as mentioned on some web sites.
allow wake timers: off (for both plugged in and battery) this was set to 'important wake timers only' for plugged in.
I looked up "S4 Doze to Hibernate" and apparently it is infamous.
Another piece of information. After running powercfg /systemsleepdiagnostics, using an elevated command prompt and looking at the sleep interval box, I see that on 17/02/2021 the pc was in sleep mode then exactly three hours later it went into "Hibernate from Sleep - Fixed Timeout". Which ties in with the above 'hybernate after/plugged in setting', which was 180 minutes. (But I've never been anywhere near that setting in the past).

Is this making any sense to anyone? Am I really fixing anything, or is this all being caused by a recent windows update that has introduced some incompatibility with my laptop and nothing I do will work? If this doesn't work, do I need to uninstall the last update (cumulative update KB4601319, done on 11/02/2021) and see what happens?

Thanks for any help.

[Deleted User]

JohnB47 said:

hybernate after/plugged in: 840 minutes (this was 180 minutes). I can't seem to set 'never' as mentioned on some web sites.

To select "never" just reduce the the 840 minutes down to zero - just type 0 (zero) in the box and it will change to "never" or alternatively press lower arrow and keep going and it will go from 840 ... 839....... etc ....3 ... 2  ..1 ... Never.

My laptop does this by default in the "balanced" power plan, exactly the same, hibernates after 3 hours of sleep. It's never bothered me, still starts up in a few seconds so doesn't make any difference and I leave it set like that (4 seconds to resume from sleep, 15 seconds from hibernate).

Nothing to do with windows updates, all my Dell laptops have done this dating back many years, I thought it might be a Dell specific power plan but is probably a Win 10 default setting:

This is my default settings - same as yours:


One reason this is the default setting is the a laptop is still using power in sleep mode and if it is on battery it will eventually completely drain away. The CPU and RAM are still drawing power in sleep mode. It might take 1-3 days on a full battery but will eventually drain and so going into hibernate stops any further battery drain and eliminates the risk of losing any unsaved work or causing an ungraceful hard shut down if the battery was to completely drain which might cause other issues / data corruption.

If plugged in then going into hibernate after 3 hours is the eco friendly option as the laptop will stop using electricity.

Secondly the idea of sleep mode is for short term use when you are out and about without a power supply, allows you to put it into a very low power state to save battery but instantly resume work. I guess the reasoning behind this hibernate setting is that if it has been sleeping for 3 hours you aren't in a rush to use it again so hibernate is a better state for the laptop to be in for the long term - especially if you only have say 10-20% battery charge left.

Glad you've found the settings to change, but like I said, can't see any reason to change them in my case and just leave them as default.

JohnB47

Deleted_User said:

JohnB47 said:

hybernate after/plugged in: 840 minutes (this was 180 minutes). I can't seem to set 'never' as mentioned on some web sites.

To select "never" just reduce the the 840 minutes down to zero - just type 0 (zero) in the box and it will change to "never" or alternatively press lower arrow and keep going and it will go from 840 ... 839....... etc ....3 ... 2  ..1 ... Never.

My laptop does this by default in the "balanced" power plan, exactly the same, hibernates after 3 hours of sleep. It's never bothered me, still starts up in a few seconds so doesn't make any difference and I leave it set like that (4 seconds to resume from sleep, 15 seconds from hibernate).

Nothing to do with windows updates, all my Dell laptops have done this dating back many years, I thought it might be a Dell specific power plan but is probably a Win 10 default setting:

This is my default settings - same as yours:


One reason this is the default setting is the a laptop is still using power in sleep mode and if it is on battery it will eventually completely drain away. The CPU and RAM are still drawing power in sleep mode. It might take 1-3 days on a full battery but will eventually drain and so going into hibernate stops any further battery drain and eliminates the risk of losing any unsaved work or causing an ungraceful hard shut down if the battery was to completely drain which might cause other issues / data corruption.

If plugged in then going into hibernate after 3 hours is the eco friendly option as the laptop will stop using electricity.

Secondly the idea of sleep mode is for short term use when you are out and about without a power supply, allows you to put it into a very low power state to save battery but instantly resume work. I guess the reasoning behind this hibernate setting is that if it has been sleeping for 3 hours you aren't in a rush to use it again so hibernate is a better state for the laptop to be in for the long term - especially if you only have say 10-20% battery charge left.

Glad you've found the settings to change, but like I said, can't see any reason to change them in my case and just leave them as default.

Thanks. That worked - I've now set hibernate to Never, just to see how it goes.
However, having made my last post, I realised that I'd gotten so deep into detail that I'd forgotten the actual problem. Which is that the PC is actually switching itself off in an uncontrolled way. It's not that it is going from sleep mode to hibernate and saving open docs and the state of browser tabs (if i've understood hibernate correctly) - it just seems to shut down and I have to recover the previously opened files and reload the browser tabs.
Also, I've been using this laptop for years by putting it in Sleep mode regularly during the day and last thing at night. It has never, until a couple of weeks ago, been switching itself off (or going into hibernation). 
One question - how do you tell if your PC has gone into hibernation properly? e.g if you have a file open and minimised to the task bar and Chrome browser running with a few tabs open, would you expect them to automatically be in place after powering on from hibernate? That's not happening for me. Perhaps I should try hybernating the laptop manually to see how it powers up. Edit: just tried it and apart from it not connecting to wifi (as per my other thread) files and browser is as before. So that's what a correct hibernate looks like.
Hmmm. So the problem seems to be an incorrect shutdown when going from sleep to hibernate.
Thanks again.

JohnB47

Here's an update. I changed some settings as follows:

In settings/system/power and sleep/additional power settings/change plan settings/change advanced power settings:

sleep/sleep after: battery 20mins, plugged in Never

allow hybrid sleep: Never to both (plugged in had been set to 180mins)

hibernate after: battery 120mins, plugged in Never

allow wake timers: both disabled

Then I noticed some programs that seemed to create lots of disk activity when the pc was taken out of sleep. One was sysmain. I disabled this as per advice on the internet. I also saw something called Game Bar taking up disk time, so I disabled that too.
Now the pc stays in sleep mode and comes out of sleep mode much quicker than before.

Also, some more odd things recently. Yesterday, the missus logged in and got a 'Lets get Started' screen, which took her through some options. From memory, this is what we get when we've had an update. So I looked at recent updates and there was no difference - the last update was 12/02/2021. Today was the same but I checked for updates anyway. It then said I had KB4023057 waiting to install. So I clicked on Install Now and it reported sucess after about three seconds. Usually this operation takes quite a few minutes, with a restart often being requested. It is now being listed as installed today.
I have no idea what's going on with this PC but things seem to have calmed down now. Even the problems with connecting to wifi when brought out of sleep (discussed on a separate thread) seem to have gone.
Thanks for the help eveyone.

JohnB47

Another update. PC still doing odd things. Occasionally, when put into sleep, it would stay running (screen goes blank, mouse unresponsive but power light permanently on and disk running). I can use ctrl alt del and see a few options. Then after a while it fully powers off and I can see, after powering on, it had powered off uncontrollably (had to reload Chrome tabs etc.).
So then I decided to use Hybernate instead. This seems to work as expected but when I take it out of hybernate, the wifi connection is never made - not once in around 8 times in the last two days. Thankfully I can reconnect easily every time (before, I had to restart the router before 'connect' would work). Perhaps that's because I've renamed the 5GHz band. Just now the same thing happended and I decided to go into the network adapter and disable/enable it. Wif fi connected immediately.
I see over on the Plusnet forum that this router is not well liked - something to do with 5GHz in particular. A software update is supposedly imminent 'next month'. I've tried 'preferring' both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz and still have this problem - preferring doesn't seem to make any difference when it sucessfully connects automatically anyway.
Still baffled as to why this all started a few weeks ago. This laptop has had no wifi or sleep problems for years.