I’m finally starting to trust Microsoft’s portable Xbox Allys

I still don’t want to buy an Xbox Ally, and I still don’t think the modified version of Windows it shipped with is ready for primetime use. The Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) needs work. But two months after me The white $600 Xbox Ally was slammed and not quite sold on the $1,000 black oneOne of my most hated Windows problems is getting better.

I haven’t stopped testing these laptops After my October review; I’ve been playing Hollow Knight: Silk Song and Blue Prince On them. I installed FSE on MSI Claw 8 AI Plus as well. After too many updates to count, I’m finally starting to trust two of these laptops to save my game (and battery life) when I put them to sleep. Even the third one isn’t as bad as it was.

Sleep has been the biggest reason to buy a Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch over a Windows portable device. To me, that’s the whole point of mobile gaming. If I can stop and resume at any time by just pressing the power button, I can handle big matches for five, 10, or 20 minutes at a time and actually finish them. It’s a completely different lifestyle for gaming when you don’t have to save and finish every session, and when you can just press one button to do it.

It was Windows awesome In sleep mode for years, but in December, I didn’t lose my game once with the more expensive black Xbox Ally I recently left a game open for about nine full days, and the game was right where it left off when I returned. Battery drain while sleeping seems reasonable, too: I only lose 4 to 8 percent of its battery from day to day. (I lost 40 percent of battery during this nine-day period.)

There are other errors: sometimes I cannot control myself immediately after resuming sleep; Sometimes the Xbox and Asus buttons stop working for a bit when Windows decides to update things automatically in the background. After that nine-day period, Windows automatically decided that I had to authenticate and reset my PIN before it would let me sign in.

Also, the SSD in my colleague Tom Warren’s Xbox Ally Assuming the SSD is the drive maker’s fault, the Xbox Ally (We asked Asus about the SSD.)

The white Xbox Ally, powered by AMD’s Z2 A chip, is a different story. The test has been done two For several months, and even after installing every Windows, Asus, Game Bar, and Xbox App update, including several that claim to address sleep, I watched both units wake up repeatedly without ever being touched. I would leave it on my desk all day while I worked and watch it light up on its own, draining its batteries in the process.

On November 19, I put a black Xbox Ally Thirteen hours later, the white unit was completely dead, while the black unit remained at 91 percent.

On November 20, I tried again with 88 percent and 82 percent battery respectively. About four days later, the white one died; Black has 61 percent remaining.

I tried factory resetting one of the white units, and I think something has improved since then. I’ve had many days where my toy was waiting for me when I woke her up. But on December 6th, I found her toasting herself inside my shoulder bag at 10:55 AM. The records showed me that he woke up around midnight the night before and turned off his screen around 1 a.m., but never went back to sleep. Since its screen was off and its fan was nearly silent, I didn’t notice that it was still running when I put it in the bag.

And on December 7th, the same fully updated factory reset for Xbox Ally mysteriously stopped 54 percent overnight.

Asus claimed it had not yet been able to reproduce my issues. But I’m seeing these issues across a couple of different consoles, and I’ve seen scattered reports elsewhere on the web, and we know that the Xbox Ally’s AMD Z2 A processor supports essentially fewer sleep modes than the Xbox Ally X. Bazzite had to consult with AMD To get some sleep while working in Linux on the Z2 A chip.

I’m not sure why it’s taking Microsoft so long to fix the issue in Windows, or how complex the issue is there. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and has not provided me with substantive comment in the past. But I wonder if that might be unique to the Z2 A chip, because I don’t have much of an issue with the Intel Lunar Lake inside the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus either, now that I’m doing it manually Updated to newer BIOS was not showing When I first experienced the Xbox experience there.

With Intel Claw 8, handheld device I originally couldn’t trust sleepNow I can — and I’ve seen battery drain of up to 2 percent per day while snoozing. I did encounter bugs in the Insider Preview, including one black screen and a persistent issue that capped the frame rate at 30fps until I changed power modes, but bugs are to be expected there.

It took a while to get to the Steam Deck To be fully baked, Microsoft probably needs some time as well. If how to put a PC to sleep is figured out, and Xbox Ally is just one exception, it will change the entire conversation about portable Windows devices.

Even today, the vanilla Xbox Ally probably isn’t such a bad deal. You can find it offline For $489 on Amazonor $499 at AsusAnd only Install Bazzite instead. Bazzite is more reliable than Windows, has higher performance, and is better in my tests, unless you’re playing games Use of incompatible anti-cheat software Or you’re very attached to the Xbox game library.