While we understand the intentions of Modern Standby, Microsoft's implementation has been poorly communicated to consumers. Nonetheless, the hot surfaces and temperatures we observed would still occur even after applying all updates and disabling the WiFi. Modern Standby allows for additional background activity like system updates and online downloads at the cost of increased power consumption. The main culprit is Microsoft's Modern Standby feature which replaces the older S3 power state mode that most users are familiar with. The phenomenon is not exclusive to our test units as there are multiple online user reports of hot laptops and fast draining batteries when in 'Sleep' mode.

Such high temperatures would be unfavorable for battery life and any nearby items. Surface temperatures would become as warm as 50 C as shown by our temperature maps below simply by doing nothing. The latter is perhaps the most egregious example as we're able to measure a steady consumption of 27.4 W when the lid is closed and in 'Sleep' mode throughout the night. We've come across at least three examples of laptops becoming very warm when in Sleep mode: the Dell XPS 15 7590, Asus ZenBook 15, and the more recent Lenovo IdeaPad S740 15. Unfortunately, some newer laptops would consume much more power by over a factor of 10 and become very warm as a result even though the system is stowed away.

We would measure a consumption rate of under 2 W when under such conditions in most cases. When you close your laptop display, you would expect the laptop to enter Sleep or Hibernation mode and consume as little power as possible in the process. Our temperature measurements on the Dell were performed prior to applying the fix.)

( Januupdate: Dell was quick to release a hotfix related to Modern Standby for its series on August 30, 2019.

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