Dell XPS 15 9550 won't stay asleep after creators update

How is this Dell's fault?

Windows 10 installed a new version. In case you haven't noticed, Microsoft = Windows.

For one, MS support is also shunting responsibility and telling me it’s Dell’s fault. Second, as an engineer myself who spent a good chunk of my career working on platforms at MS (so yes, I’m aware who built the OS), I understand that these issues tend to span software and hardware. Third, the Dell forums are filled with similar complaints and it seems to be a lot less common among other manufacturers.

And fourth, your tone is at best unhelpful and at worst rude.

The Realtek driver has been the culprit in the past with this system, and at first I thought the creators update had obliterated my "powercfg /requestsoverride" setting for it (which it had), so I added it back in, but it no longer solves the problem. (The Realtek driver is usually engaged by Unity opening and holding on to an audio stream for dear life.)

The 3 hour timer seems to be related to sleep -> hibernate transition. I just disabled hibernate (which seems to come up quite often in these forums), and as of now the computer doesn't seem to be powering back up. I don't really consider this a solution though because ideally it should be able to enter hibernate without any issues.

I can't really run /lastwake because when it enters this power-on state, I'm not able to actually use the computer after opening the lid. (The fan is running at full steam but the screen doesn't turn on.) The only way out of it seems to be to do a hard shut down, at which point it reboots and shows me a blue screen saying it didn't boot properly.

Good idea keeping the screen open. I can switch my hibernate timer to 1 minute to see if I can access to computer at that point and figure out why it a) powered on and b) didn't actually hibernate.

Fundamentally I don't understand why it's powering on to hibernate--I guess the system needs to capture a snapshot? That seems like a really bad implementation, though. I can't find any docs that might clear it up.

The Creator's update, fall version is causing problems for my 9365 regarding power but not waking up.  It does wake up for a few seconds every time the hibernation expires, but goes right back into standby.

Are you showing any timers which look for 3 hours?  If closing the lid puts it to sleep, have you tried just leaving the lid open and using the power button to put it to sleep so you can watch it.

I assume the /lastwake switch is telling you it is the Realtek audio waking it up?  Possibly related to Cortana or some other Microphone/speaker/camera situation?  tried disabling the audio or disconnecting the network?

You might try running a sleep study on the system but I think it is mostly for Modern Standby systems.

Are you running the basic Dell Power scheme and the Balanced scheme doesn't help?

The fall Creator's Update has made changes which are messing with the hibernation function.  If you turn of hibernation, you also turn off the Fast Startup option.

It is probably too late, but if you had the option to roll back it might help.  If you have had problems related to Unity, which appears to be game development software, perhaps check for an update for it?

The problem with Unity has been around forever and I don't expect them to fix it any time soon. But I've been able to work around it in the past by setting up a request override.

After disabling hibernate, the problem goes away. I'd still prefer if my machine could hibernate, but for now it's at least not burning up in my bag.