I pulled my laptop out of my bag after a commute lasting a little over an hour, and it was warm. Not "just came off my desk" warm. Bag-cooking warm, with 18% of the battery gone from a machine that was supposedly asleep the entire time.

I had blamed Modern Standby for years, muttering that "Windows sleep is bad" whenever my laptop emerged from a bag warmer and emptier than I expected. That explanation had become so convenient that I never stopped to check whether my laptop even used Modern Standby.

When I finally asked Windows to show me what had happened, it dismantled my diagnosis almost immediately. My laptop used traditional S3 sleep, and during the matching 1 hour and 21-minute session, it had never entered that sleep state at all.