Surface Power Management with Modern Standby in Windows 10
Published Jan 31 2019 02:51 PM 7,783 Views
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First published on TECHNET on Feb 23, 2016
Surface is in a class of devices that uses Modern Standby rather than traditional S3 Sleep. This allows us to manage power consumption right down to the individual hardware components. The net effect is near instant resume times and more efficient power consumption. In today's demo bench with Program Manager Joao Botto, we walk through the two Modern Standby modes:


  • Connected Standby, also known as InstantGo, for always-on computing

  • Disconnected Standby for longer battery life


We explain how Modern Standby works, and how you can switch between the two modes.



If you wish to configure large numbers of Surface remotely or if you have Surface 3 LTE devices and wish to disable LTE in addition to Wi-Fi, you can use the Powercfg command to shift from Connected Standby to Disconnected Standby:

  • powercfg /setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_none F15576E8-98B7-4186-B944-EAFA664402D9 0

  • powercfg /setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_none F15576E8-98B7-4186-B944-EAFA664402D9 0


To revert back to Connected Standby, use the same two commands and GUID, but change the value from 0 to 1. We hope that you find today's overview useful. Keep checking back here on this blog and on Microsoft Mechanics for the latest on Surface management and engineering. Follow us @MSFTMechanics.
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