Dell doubles down on justifying XPS 15 9570 problems

Dell is pushing the benefits of Modern Standby over the S3 sleep for the XPS 15 9570 hard. The company has published a Knowledge Base article as it previously promised it would, which has been publicised by XPS Vice President and General Manager Frank Azor on Twitter.

Dell insists that Modern Standby will wake a system faster than S3 can, which Microsoft has thoroughly covered in its own support article. In essence, Dell is telling XPS 15 9570 owners that having wake on Wi-Fi enabled along with an outdated BIOS and drivers are to blame for high power consumption when the device is asleep. Incidentally, these also apply to the Precision 5530. Dell states the following too for both devices:

Set the system up to use Modern Standby – Disconnected. This tells the NIC not to stay awake while in sleep mode. This is what Dell sets in the factory by default[.]

How to do this is still elusive though, as Dell has previously told people to do this without explaining how to do so. As the first comment on Azor's corresponding tweet pointed out, Dell is failing to acknowledge that Modern Standby is causing some XPS 15 9570 laptops to get hot when asleep and experience high battery drain.

Dell is still yet to offer a reason why it will not re-include S3 in the XPS 15 9570 BIOS, which it removed almost a year ago. We doubt that this is at Microsoft's insistence either, as Lenovo bowed to consumer pressure and re-enabled S3 sleep with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Dell's intransigence is undoubtedly frustrating its customers though. Otherwise, it would not have released a Knowledge Base article explaining how S3 sleep so inferior to Modern Standby. Removing a feature and forcing customers to use something that causes issues was never going to be a popular decision.