Tech
Please stop using Sleep mode on your Windows laptop
You charged your laptop to 100% last night, closed the lid, and put it in your bag. However, when you take it out the next day to get started on your work (or browse the web) it won’t turn on—the battery is dead!
How can this be? If you didn’t use the laptop, where did the power go? Why is it so hot? These and other questions will be answered shortly, hopefully before you’re out of juice!
Your laptop isn’t actually sleeping
Closing the lid of your laptop doesn’t guarantee that it’s actually asleep or off. Modern laptops can enter a light sleep mode where some components are still active in a low power mode and can still perform tasks.
Laptops that are set to “sleep” on lid close but have hybrid sleep or Modern Standby enabled might be idling closer to full power than you realize. Most laptops out in the wild run Windows, and Windows has a special sleep mode called “Modern Standby.” This has been a much-maligned feature. Based on what people have said, it seems to be unreliable and unpredictable. It’s likely a key reason why your laptop emptied its battery overnight.
Modern Standby is meant to make your laptop act more like a smartphone—ready almost instantly. But connected devices like USB dongles or Bluetooth peripherals might constantly wake the device in this mode. Being connected to Wi-Fi and downloading updates or doing background tasks will also use power.
Background apps keep chewing power
Speaking of background tasks, messaging apps, cloud syncing, and (as I mentioned) update services can all remain active while your laptop is (as far as you know) asleep. Some apps may also prevent your laptop from sleeping, so when you close the lid the screen turns off, but the laptop remains on. This can happen with apps like media players, which obviously wouldn’t work right if the computer went to sleep 30 minutes into a movie.
Wireless radios don’t shut down
If your laptop is going to stay connected while asleep, that will drain your battery. Although unless there are active data transfers running, this isn’t usually an issue. When this works correctly, the laptop’s radios just refresh the connection periodically to prevent a timeout and ensure things are connected the moment you open the lid.
Your battery or charger has a hidden issue
While the most likely culprit of unexplained laptop battery drain is a misbehaving sleep mode, sometimes there’s something genuinely wrong with your power system.
An aging battery is a likely reason. Most of the time, it takes a few years for batteries to reach the point where they no longer hold a charge overnight. However, this can happen to relatively new laptops if the battery is faulty. A battery will also wear down if it’s subjected to high operating temperatures, or it’s gone through too many charge cycles.
You can generate a battery health report in Windows 10 and 11 which will indicate if the battery is too worn for use. Checking your MacBook’s battery health is even easier and doesn’t involve a command line.
The next potential issue is your charger, its cable, or both. It might not be that your battery drained itself overnight, but that your charger didn’t charge it up in the first place. Now, this doesn’t mean the charger or cable are faulty. You may simply be using a charger that doesn’t put out enough wattage to both power your laptop and charge it at the same time.
Test the charger and check that the cable is the right type for the power you need, in the case of a USB-C charger.
Settings that fix overnight drain for good
The first thing you’ll want to do on a Windows laptop is switch to hibernation. Hibernation doesn’t use any power, because the laptop is actually off. The contents of RAM have been stored on your SSD and when you turn the laptop back on, it restores that data and picks up where it left off. On modern SSDs, this happens so quickly that hibernation is a viable alternative.
While you can disable Modern Standby using the Command Prompt, I don’t recommend it because officially WIndows doesn’t support older types of sleep mode and the results could be unpredictable.
What also seems to (anecdotally) work for some Windows laptop users is unplugging the laptop before closing the lid. It seems that in some cases closing the lid, then unplugging the laptop doesn’t put it in the proper power state and it performs background tasks as if it were asleep but plugged in. This isn’t an official fix or anything, but it can’t hurt to try.
I also suggest following our Windows laptop battery optimization guide, which will show you how to kill background processes, identify and disconnect parasitic peripherals, and make use of energy-saving power modes.
