Hi. Just wanted to alert the community to an issue that recently occurred on my Galaxy Book 4 Pro 360 notebook (but likely applies to all models). When opening the lid and resuming work the other day, everything was going very slow. By looking at Task Manager I could see that the CPU was never going above 5%, despite having lots of work to do. As you would imagine, this rendered the computer almost impossibly slow to use, and I was on the verge of sending it back to Samsung for a swap. In fact I even had a return label ready when I switched the laptop back on one last time to wipe my personal data. That's when I found it back to working normally!
After a good bit of Googling, the problem I experienced seems to be a design feature of the Intel CPU, which goes into a 'limp mode' when it gets too hot. The cooling on this laptop seems to work pretty well, so why would my laptop overheat? In normal operation, I have never had it do so. But, there is a bit of an issue with the Windows config and this laptop. By default, when you close the lid, the laptop goes into "sleep" mode. This stops processing, but allows the CPU to wake to perform updates, etc. So, unknown to me, closing the lid and zipping the laptop away in a case, gave it just the right snug environment for it to overheat when waking up to do updates.
So, here's some solutions, since putting your laptop away in a case is a very common (and desirable) scenario:
For users: Set your laptop to "hibernate" instead of "sleep" when closing the lid ("hibernate" doesn't seem to allow for auto waking). This is easier said than done in the stock Windows 11 because Microsoft seem to have only got half way through migrating settings over to their new approach. To find the relevant controls open Settings and type in "lid" in the search bar, it should give an option "Change what closing the lid does" which takes you to the old settings screen where you can enable the "Hibernate" option (eventually - you will need to click "change settings that are currently unavailable" first).
For Samsung: There is no way for us users to know what state our Galaxy Book 4 is in when the lid is closed! If the computer is only sleeping please, please, reprogram the battery light to do a slow flash, or some such, so that we know that the laptop is not properly powered down and we don't zip it away in a case. Thanks.
