Laptop Won’t Sleep with Lid Closed
By Dave Taylor
The Question:As far as I can tell, when I close the lid on my Dell Win7 laptop, it stays on until the battery dies. Then I have to reboot when I plug it in. How do I fix this behavior?
Dave’s Answer:
You’re right that your Dell laptop is behaving poorly and it is indeed possible to configure a Windows 7 system to ignore when the lid or screen is closed, which produces the exact symptom you’re seeing: the device keeps running until the battery is completely drained, at which point it dies and requires a hard reboot. Worse, if the computer happened to be writing the disk just as it died it could actually corrupt your boot disk and lose all your data too, which would be worse than having to plug in a battery to recover!
Fortunately like all Windows systems, Win7 allows you to fine tune the behavior associated with your laptop pretty easily. In fact, there’s a really handy shortcut from the Desktop that lets you get to the right spot in your Dell laptop configuration quickly.
This post is excerpted with permission from Dave Taylor.
Sign up for Dave’s emails about free tech support and special offers on books, seminars, workshops and more.
