White Papers

Introduction
Client PCs are becoming increasingly important to users lives by providing functions
such as network connectivity, phone usage, text and chat, TV usage, and so on, As
PCs continue to become a centralized entity in our daily lives, the ability to deliver
optimal power to the computer while maintaining long battery life and near-instant
response time has become a critical demand of all customers. A key enabler to
provide this level of long battery life and instant behavior is the introduction of
Modern Standby in future computer designs.
Modern Standby is the revolutionary migration of the Windows sleep state to enable a
PC’s idle-system optimizations and instant-on behavior.
Dell has launched several systems over the past few years enabling the Modern
Standby feature and will continue to aggressively drive optimal user behavior with
internal and external partnerships.
Overview and Details of Modern Standby
Modern Standby is the next step in the evolution of low-power sleep states for
Microsoft operating systems. Several instances of low-power implementations have
taken place in the past with various levels of success with power and performance
targets. The most prevalent is S3 suspend which places the system into the ACPI
system sleep state of S3. This behavior is common over the past 20 years but provides
limited performance capabilities. An inability to provide instant-on and perform
operations while in S3 are historical drawbacks of this power state.
Modern Standby in Windows 10
Since Windows 10’s inception, Modern Standby has been constantly refined to make
it more resilient as well as address new user scenarios such as wake on voice, wake
on fingerprint reader, and the ability to stream audio from your PC while in Modern
Standby.
You can also support non-SSD hard drives, more selectively waking up in connected
designs to reduce battery usage and making ecosystem drivers more aware of the
power state.
Modes of Modern Standby
There are two main modes of Modern Standby: Connected and Disconnected Standby.
These two modes allow for varying network capabilities of the system and should be
evaluated independently of each other.