I just got a new laptop, Toshiba Satellite Windows 8, touch screen, i7, 16g ram etc etc. The battery life when using it is fine but sleep mode sucks. I'll charge it 100%, close it, and try to open it in 36 hours and it's completely dead. Is this the norm for laptops now? I have had previous laptops that would sit closed for a week or more and at least have enough juice left to fire up. I swear my old Asus Eee netbook with windows XP could sit in sleep for a month when it was new and still fire up but my mind might be exaggerating that.

Are you sure your old laptops weren't set to hibernate instead of sleep?

Yeah, Hibernate is what mine does. I turned it off for a month once and had enough juice to log in and get the info that the battery was dying.

I have no idea about your specific laptop, but well configured laptops should drain only about 2% a day. Maybe a little more if configured to do sleep-mode updates. Hibernation should NEVER be required anymore, usually only used as a backup when the battery dies while asleep.

What model is it, exactly? If it's a cheaper one, it won't have been built with battery life in mind. You might have an older generation processor that sucks more power.

Don't have the exact model right now, but I noticed a couple days ago that after sitting in sleep mode all night in my backpack it was warm in the morning. Generating a lot of heat. I've never noticed a sleeping laptop do that before. Something doesn't seem right.

Are you sure it's actually... going to sleep? It should be ice cold when it's asleep, since nothing is running. It's just powering the RAM a little and some other little tiny crap.

If you hear a fan at any point you can be 100% sure it didn't sleep.

CM I'm not sure and I don't exactly know how to check.....however, I wanted to follow up this thread with this: I changed me "lid closed" behavior to hibernate instead of sleep. Startup time on lid-open is negligibly slower, literally by a couple seconds, and all my problems are solved. I can carry it around in my backpack all week and since I usually open it, use for 10 minutes, and close it, I can get away with only charging on the weekends if I really want. This is what I like.

Well if it works for you that's fine but that's not a fix, that's a workaround. A good laptop should have no problems with suspend these days.

Where is this "suspend" option? The only settings I have are "Sleep" and "Hibernate". If I go into the Advance options I have the ability to set the length of time to "Sleep" before it automatically goes into "Hibernate" for both when it's plugged in or when it's on battery. But I don't see a "suspend" option...