My dell xps hibernation doesn't work.

20% of the time it works.

40% of the time it won't wake and I have to kill it (screen stays dark even though keyboard indicates it is awake)

30% of the time it just immediately wakes

10% of the time it wakes at like 2am and power cycles my monitor every 30 seconds waking me up

>> 10% of the time it wakes at like 2am and power cycles my monitor every 30 seconds waking me up

My thinkpad does the same. Wtf is up with that?

My Mac did that too but I tracked it to Wake on LAN, some random probes from other equipment were walking it up sometimes.

What kind of evil IoT crapware is sending WoL packets to random devices on the network?

It wasn't actual WoL. It was broadcasts. For some reason it woke the Mac up when WoL was switched on. We're taking 2015 or so so I don't have the packet logs anymore but I was able to replicate it by resending them.

So the fault is really the Mac's. It should only accept real well formed WoL packets with its own Mac address.

OK, from the comments I read so far I realize that I may have been lucky with an older laptop. And I did not mention that I also turned off wake timers, realized that now. If this does not work on modern hardware that’s a real bummer.

I'll back you up on this. I tried the trick to switch to hibernate, but it actually got worse for me than my problems with sleep.

In my case it also messes with many internal devices like webcam, USB etc.

Half the time i have to reboot to make those work again.

The funny thing is that the "modern standby" was supposed to improve the wakeup time from a couple of seconds to a faction of a second. But effectively it turned the wakeup into 10 seconds because you have to disable the modern standby and use hibernate instead.

The whole idea of modern standby is brain dead.

My laptop isn't a cellphone, I don't need it periodically waking up to check emails or whatever, it can do it when I open the lid.

Thankfully my laptop has an option to force S3 only in the bios.

TFA says that hibernation is problematic for putting your computer into your bag. I understand what you mean by hibernation, and while it should not cause a problem... that's what the link says

When windows is hibernated, if a scheduled task is set for a specific time, it will use the hardware wake-up feature to turn on the machine and run the scheduled task.

Windows has a lot of 3am scheduled tasks for all kinds of random stuff (disk defrag, various update checks, etc). Any of those can cause the system to reawaken.

I had to do this with my ASUS Zephyrus G14 because it's an AMD-based machine and doesn't support a true Standby mode anyway. It's not the greatest coming from the Mac ecosystem where Sleep basically just works (well, most of the time, High Sierra screwed up a lot of things around that).

To my knowledge, it hasn't woken up without my input and Hibernate doesn't eat the battery alive while it's asleep.

The problem with this is, you can force the laptop to use other sleep modes, but either a) dell disables those modes entirely in the BIOS b) windows update resets the sleep mode

That won't always save you, there have definitely been bugs where it tries to hibernate but gets stuck