Basically every laptop I’ve owned I’ve had to disable sleep when the lid is closed as I often leave them plugged in and want background tasks like downloads or updates to be able to run while I’m not using the machine. However, I don’t think PC laptops have a way to switch to a super low power state and just run background tasks like downloads, alarms and notifications or running scheduled tasks without just being left on in regular power mode. Why is this not just a default feature of laptops, given that phones and tablets have been doing this kind of thing for the last decade or more?
Does anyone know if there are plans to make power management for laptops allow for running certain tasks in Windows or Linux in the future? My smug Apple using friend tells me his Macbook already does this, but is the lack of this feature on PCs software related or something innate to x86 vs ARM architecture?
What you’re describing exists, just not for what you’re trying to do with it.
(sO) modern standby has your box sit there in low power mode waking up occasionally to check for updates.
I’ve attached one of my mesh central power logs from a laptop that’s allowed to run s0.
But you can’t use it for torrent downloads and user apps. Even if it allowed you to try it wouldn’t work, s0 doesn’t save any power while the updates are installing They still need all the power to do the install and handle the crypto. They just shut back down when they’re done which isn’t how torrent clients work
Maybe this will change in the future now that new laptop processors has “little” E cores like mobile phones?
From that perspective we’re already seeing substantial advantages coming from the new hardware on the market. They’re lowering the TDP of the entire processor to save power. He used to burn 50 or 60 Watts just to run some torrents now It’s nothing to have a laptop running on 15 or 20 Watts near idle.
Your power savings don’t need to come from sleep they can just come from more efficient operation. Peer to peer has always been hard to make efficient.
It should also be noted that many, many laptops struggle to stay asleep during modern standby. If you’ve had a relatively recent laptop suddenly wake up in your backpack and overheat itself, it’s probably some driver or application not taking modern standby into account and keeping the device active for no reason.
This is quite problematic for various brands, and it’s why many people want s3 sleep back.
As for updates, I think they could be done better in this method. Intel and ARM CPUs all use big.LITTLE style designs with slow, low power cores and fast, energy sucking cores. I think you could run an efficiency core for quite a while without wasting too much battery if you’re just applying updates. You’ll need to produce the update in a simple format (no or very fast decompression, quick block level diffs with few conditional operations) but at about or even less than 5W per core, you could let even a laptop passively soak up heat for quite a while before it becomes noticeable, especially when you take three or four minutes to apply an update. Not running the video card and the power hungry CPU cores could save you quite a lot of power compared to installing updates in a normal state.