Modern Standby is draining your Windows 11 laptop battery, and Microsoft won't fix it

There are plenty of reasons people don't like Windows 11, and one of them has typically been battery life. It's never fun to pick up a laptop you put to sleep the day before and realize it's dried up in the meantime. That particular situation is actually the main problem with Windows 11 on laptops.

Sure, the bloated experience of Windows 11 and the unnecessarily high resource usage when idle are also big problems, but standby battery drain is really the biggest problem, and it's all because of something called Modern Standby.

Windows 11 and battery

Modern standby is a big problem

There are a few reasons why Windows 11 tends to have worse battery life than its competitors, and some of them are related to active use. Windows 11 is very actively connected to the internet and runs a lot of background tasks at any given time. It might be syncing with OneDrive, checking for viruses, downloading updates, updating information for apps in the background, and many more things that eat away at your battery. A lot of apps also like creating startup tasks that use up even more resources.

But the real problem with Windows 11 is what it does when you're not using it. Many of us tend to simply close our laptops when we're done using them, which puts them to sleep and keeps running apps open. However, when you do this, Windows keeps running certain services in the background. It might keep your internet connection active to check for updates, synchronize emails and other data, and other tasks that might be considered essential.

It's happened to me multiple times that I put my laptop in a backpack and it comes out hot to the touch due to the laptop running when it wasn't supposed to, and you can imagine what that would do to the battery. These tasks may not be huge, but just by running at all, they use a noticeable amount of power, and even more so when it requires using the internet. Over multiple hours, even these light tasks add up.

It wasn't always like this because, in the past, Windows computers in sleep mode would go into what is called an S3 sleep state, which turned off the processor and many components of the motherboard, only leaving the RAM running to remember your session information. Modern Standby changed this so that your processor can still run for some of these lightweight tasks.

The hardware doesn't help

x86 has never been power efficient

If you read the above, you might be thinking: "Wait a minute, my phone does all that and more in sleep mode and the battery doesn't die that quickly", but there are some things to consider here. First, you probably already expect less from your phone, seeing as most of us charge them overnight. But the other big problem here is the hardware inside these devices.

Most smartphones use very low-power processors based on the Arm architecture, and this makes a huge difference. Not only do smartphone processors have lower power usage targets in the first place, but Arm-based processors have always been designed with the intention of being very power-efficient for background tasks. It's been that way for years, partly because of what's called a big.LITTLE architecture, which allows processors to have more powerful cores that are used for active tasks and more power-efficient cores that handle background tasks much more efficiently, at the expense of some performance. When you turn off your phone's screen, it's mostly using the power-efficient cores, which allows it to consume extremely minimal amounts of power and extend battery life.

Laptop processors have typically relied on x86 processors, and this architecture is simply not designed with this kind of power efficiency in mind. Until relatively recently, the concept of power efficient cores and performance cores wasn't really present in the x86 space, so whenever a background task had to be performed, it would fire up the big, power-hungry cores.

Since late 2021, this has changed somewhat, with Intel finally introducing P-cores and E-cores, but while E-cores were certainly more optimized, it still wasn't on the level of efficiency that most Arm processors have.

It's getting better

The hardware is finally catching up

Thankfully, those early attempts at optimization have only kept going in recent years since 2021, and recently, things have improved a lot. Intel, for its part, has gone through at least two massive re-imaginings of its laptop processors. First, it was Meteor Lake at the start of 2024, which added a new tier of core called LP E-Core, requiring even less power to run background tasks. Then, with Lunar Lake later that year, the company introduced another completely new chip design with Lunar Lake that ditched LP E-Cores but focused massively on power efficiency, with very evident results.

At the same time, Arm-based processors have been making more of a statement in the Windows laptop space. Windows on Arm is almost a decade old, but early efforts were just using smartphone processors scaled up for more powerful devices. Since the Snapdragon X series in 2024, these chips are designed from the ground up for PCs, and you get both great performance and the power efficiency that smartphone processors have always been known for.

These hardware improvements have made standby power consumption far less of a problem on Windows laptops, even though Windows itself is probably still running more tasks in sleep mode than it really should. That's one area where Linux handily beats Windows, and it's not clear that will change anytime soon.

Maybe turn off your laptop

At the end of the day, Windows really isn't that bad when it comes to battery usage overall, it's sleep mode that's the problem. And the problems with sleep mode can actually be circumvented a lot of the time if you just turn off the computer when you're done using it. Sure, it won't remember where you left off, but most of the time, that may be a fine trade-off.