Back in the mid 90s, most of the Windows computers were desktop computers and they did not even support the basic standby mode (now known as legacy standby). Thing changed in the next decades and we first saw hibernate and hybrid power modes and now with Windows 10, there is a new Modern Standby mode. In the modern standby mode, your Windows computer can carry out some of the background processes and access the network while keeping the computer in a very low power consumption mode. As can be guessed, it wakes up from the modern idle mode really very fast.
But this modern idle mode is not supported by all the computers running Windows 10. The availability of this mode depends on your system’s BIOS, networking adapters, system settings and other settings. Here is how you can find out which power modes are supported by your system:
- Press Win+R to open the Run dialog.
- In the Run dialog, type cmd.exe and press Enter.
- In the command prompt window that shows up enter the following command:
powercfg /availablesleepstates
- You will see a list of all the supported power states followed by a list of all the unsupported power states. You can see in the following screenshot for our test PC, that S0 low power idle (modern standby) is not supported.
Here is an explanation of all the power states and their codes:
Not all of these power modes or power states are available for all the Windows computers. For example, a Windows PC can have only one of the S1, S2 and S3 sleep states. Subsequently, the hybrid sleep mode (which depends on S1, S2 or S3) could be available or could be missing from your system. Similarly, the S0 low power idle mode is available only on Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Furthermore, S0 low power idle could support network access depending on your network adapter and version of Windows operating system. While you can enable or disable the Hibernate power state in your Windows PC, there is no way to enable or disable the modern standby mode for your Windows PC.