Unable to sleep while plugged in

[HomerSF]

I have a brand new Spectre x360 13t (gem cut, i7, 16gb RAM, 512gb SSD, 1080 brightview screen) that appears not to sleep upon lid close or power button press when plugged into an AC adapter or USB-C monitor that provides power. The machine sleeps fine when unplugged and operating on battery. Anyone else solve a similar issue?

Solutions attempted:

- updated all drivers through HP Support Assistant

- manually updated BIOS and a few additional drivers (serial IO, bluetooth)

- updated windows 10

- ran powercfg /requests, which sometimes reports nothing and sometimes legacy kernal caller. either way, the machine won't sleep

HP support response:

- updated all drivers, bios and windows again. nice try but nothing.

- the fans and power button light stay on by design when plugged in. i noted that this was not the case for the old 2017spectre x360, which i also own.

- perform a factory reset of the machine and erase all apps/data files. ah...the old IT support standby, which i am hoping to avoid. this also contradicts the response above, which says the computer stays on by design.

can anybody help?? is it true that when plugged in, sleep means the fans and power button will stay on by design? i'm skeptical!

[HomerSF · Accepted solution]

Okay so I've done some additional research. It appears tech support may be correct. Although a more detailed explanation would have been helpful and more convincing.

It appears the latest generation Spectre x360 13t utilizes Windows 10 "modern standby" which treats sleep like turning off the screen on your smartphone. So the laptop remains essentially on, but selectively powers down certain devices and allows only certain "essential" programs to run. It leaves things like your bluetooth connection on, the fans running if necessary, and the power button lit. I tested this by changing the lid close action to hibernate, which powered down the computer as expected. This tells me a new sleep mode was implemented, as the lid sensor works correctly.

Not sure who I'm more frustrated at...HP for implementing a new sleep mode without documentation or Microsoft for designing such a ridiculous sleep mode in the first place. Who would expect that a laptop in sleep mode would still have the fans running and wake up upon slight moves to a bluetooth mouse that remains connected.

[HeimerHeimer]

Also verify that external devices like mouse and keyboard aren't allowed to wake up the machine - these are enabled by default.