Dell XPS 13 9310 sleep mode issues

@juliatuttle Is the sign of life thing still working?

@juliatuttle - You are a GODSEND!  I have been troubleshooting this on my own and with Dell for two weeks, and disabling the Sign-of-Life settings absolutely did the trick!  I owe you for the many wasted hours of my life I wouldn't have been able to get back.  Thanks!

To anyone else who has this problem: Disable your Sign-of-Life settings IMMEDIATELY!

To anyone at Dell: PLEASE make sure that people know about this fix, and please make sure your firmware development team knows there may be an issue on your new XPS 13s.  I'm kinda surprised this didn't come up in testing...

@aer212 Sorry if i'm a bit thick, but how do i do this? Also is this a fix for the Ubuntu 9310 or windows?

@aer212  Ya, I don't understand either. What is/how do I disable sign-of-life settings?

@aer212 It didn't entirely fix the problem for me, but it did drastically reduce how often it happend.

Where did you disable wake on WiFi and wake-timers?

That's the way I did it too. Make sure you keep hitting f2 as you reboot so you can get into the BIOS settings mode.

One thing I will say is that this wound up not entirely fixing my problem. I've had to try quite a few other things, such as completely disabling sleep, disabling wake on wifi, and disabling wake-timers to get my computer to stop crashing. It's been 4 days, but I'm not entirely sure it's fixed yet. This has been very frustrating.

The suggested answers (disabling sleep, wakeup timers, and sign of life) do not solve the problem. The 9310 will often (though not always) lockup when in hibernate (i.e. can not be woken from hibernate without a full cold reboot). Also, with sleep disabled, it sometimes will randomly lock up on me. So I had to re-enable sleep, but then have the problem that it sometimes fails to wake from sleep without a cold reboot (losing all work).

Another setting that seemed to help was setting my plugged in power mode (using the battery notification on the taskbar) to "Better Performance" rather than "Best Performance".  Not sure if I was having issues with power dissipation, but the lack of waking up from sleep or just a screen that went off based on my "turn off screen after" settings usually happened when my fan was going full-bore.

I do think this is a driver issue that Dell needs to address, but this seems to be helping me for now.

OK - two updates:

1. It looks like BIOS 2.0.0 (which I just installed) has an option to disable sleep in the Power tab, which seems to do exactly what the registry fix does in the article I posted before.  So that's good.
2. What's not so good is, after the BIOS update, the latest Windows updates and the latest driver updates suggested by Dell SupportAssist, my machine froze again and needed to be hard-reset, even with sleep disabled, Wake-on-WiFi disabled and sign-of-life disabled.  It seems to happen when my laptop is on without hibernating for long periods of time, and when the screen has been turned off and I'm trying to unlock my computer with the fingerprint sensor.

As I said, I would not recommend totally disabling sleep, that caused a whole host of lockups for me. I do have sleep set to "never" while on AC in power options, but apparently it still goes into a certain sort of sleep or standby overnight regardless (presumably if it has not been used in a while). 

BIOS 2.0 did not solve the problem.

Below is my link to my post that has the Event Viewer records before and after the typical crash during/upon sleep (apparently something happens during certain standby states to crash it):

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-13-9310-2-in-1-Crashes-After-Going-Into-Standby/m-p/7808634/highlight/true#M79051

@LopezM, I have similar events in my event viewer when my system needs to be hard-rebooted.  However, the event that occurs before the machine requires a hard-reboot doesn't seem to be consistent.

For me, it seems to be less about coming out of full sleep or hibernate, and more about when the screen tries to turn on when the machine is idling.  It also seems to be more likely to happen the longer I have my machine running without hibernating.  Finally, it often is accompanied by the fan going full-blast, as if the CPU is extremely busy and running hot.

Although disabling sleep, wake timers, sign-of-life and wake-on-wifi has not eliminated the problem, it has reduced the frequency of the issue for me from once every 2 days to once every 7 - 10 days.  I'm even considering restarting my machine once per week.  So although you're not recommending it, it's the only thing helping me, so I'm not sure if our issues are different.  I'm also not seeing any negative side effects of disabling sleep (which I think is very poorly implemented between Dell and Microsoft).

The only other thing I haven't been able to determine while troubleshooting is that *I think* the issue only occurs when I'm running live server while coding with VSCode.  I've been exiting live server when I let my computer idle for long periods, and it seems to have improved the problem.  But TBH, I can't say that conclusively because I can't remember if the machine has ever crashed with live server off.

Hope this makes sense to you and all.

@aer212 Thanks, I believe the temperature may be the issue. I ran the Core Temp program

https://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

and noticed that three of the cores sometimes hit 100 Celsius (TJ MAX) overnight. Also, I've never heard the fans go on -- don't even know how to force the fans on. So what I've done is set the laptop to go to sleep after 15minutes even on AC, and hibernate after 40 mins, to keep the temps lower.  

I may need to add for an exchange, but it could be a TigerLake thermal issue. I noticed Dell runs at the high TDP level (28W).  Let me know if you're hitting TJ MAX.