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Prevent Laptop From Sleeping / Turning Off When You Close The Lid

Best Tips To Prevent Your Laptop/ Notebook From Going Into Sleep/ Hibernation Mode On Closing Of Lid

You must have noticed that, whenever you close the lid of your notebook or laptop, the system turns off the screen display and places your laptop/ notebook into hibernation or sleep (stand by incase of Windows XP ) mode. If you happen to use Windows Vista or Windows XP operating system, you can tweak this behavior of your notebook/ laptop as per your choice.

For users who wish to leave their notebook/ laptop for a short time and be able to begin work immediately on opening the lid, the best option would be turning off or disabling the ability of notebook/ laptop of going into a sleep/ hibernation mode by itself. By doing this, you will be able to get back to work as soon as you re-open the lid of your notebook/ laptop.

For Windows Vista, follow the below mentioned steps to stop your laptop/ notebook from going into sleep/ hibernation mode while you close its lid.

1> Log on to the Laptop/Notebook with administrator rights. Click on “Start” button to access the “Control Panel”.

2> Within “Control Panel”, choose “System and Maintenance” and select “Power Options”.

3> Click on the option “Change Plan Settings” to make changes in currently active plan.

4> Now click on the link that helps you change the “advanced power settings”.

5> Within the dialog box “Power Options”, select the tab “Advanced Settings” for active power plan. Now expand “Power buttons & lid”.

6> Further, expand the option “Lid close action”.

7> For altering the value of “Lid close action”, you need to choose “Do nothing” from the drop-down menu for options “Plugged in” and “On battery”.

Note: The menu also contains other actions such as Sleep, Shutdown and Hibernate from which you can choose any option as per your preference.

8> Click on “OK” button.

For Windows XP, use the following procedure to disable sleep/ hibernation mode in your laptop/ notebook while you close its lid.

1> Log on to the Laptop/Notebook as an administrator. From the Start Menu, select “Control Panel”.

2> Choose “Performance and Maintenance”,

3> Click on “Power Options” and go to the “Advanced” tab.

4> Under the Section “Power buttons”, from the drop-down menu, choose “Do nothing” for the option which allows you to choose your preferred action on closing the lid of your portable computer.

Note: Hibernate and Stand by are the optional actions available within the drop-down menu.

5> Click on “OK” button.

Now you can successfully prevent laptop from sleeping / turning off when you close the lid and this post also gives you more on how to prevent a laptop from going into hibernate mode.

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Disable Windows Vista – XP From Prompting For Password On Wake Up From Sleep/Standby Mode

Simple Procedure To Disable Windows Vista And XP From Prompting For Password On Wake Up From Sleep/Standby Mode

Whenever you put your desktop computer into a sleep (standby incase of Windows XP) or hibernation mode, you must have noticed that the system gets locked up at the log on screen prompting you to input user password for unlocking the system and entering the desktop.

The same thing happens when you close the lid of your laptop, unless you have specifically disabled sleep mode on lid closing. Locking up of PC after going to sleep/ standby/ hibernation mode is an ideal security measure as signed in user is away from the machine and a prompt for password to unlock ensures data protection from strangers and hackers.

However, sometimes this creates genuine problems for legitimate usage. Incase of a standalone home PC, the user finds it quite annoying to re-enter password again and again. Also, in a company in which no sensitive data is been handled, another user will unnecessarily have to risk break the logged in session of an existing user in order to log on to the locked PC.

Nevertheless, you can now make some settings in your Windows system to disable it from asking user password whenever it resumes from sleep/ standby/ hibernation mode.

Follow these steps if you are a Windows Vista user.

Follow these steps if you are a Windows XP user.

Once you make these settings, Windows will no longer prompt for password after it resumes from sleep/ standby/ hibernation mode.

Related posts:

1> How to hibernate your laptop.

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Should I Use Stand By Option Or Hibernate Option In Windows XP

If you look at some of my previous posts, you’ll notice that I’ve mentioned about Hybrid Sleep and how to turn off hybrid sleep and how to turn on Hybrid Sleep in Windows Vista / 7. In this post, let us look in to the difference between Stand By and Hibernation options found in Windows XP.

Power saving options such as Stand By and Hibernation confuse users. What exactly is the difference between these two options? Well, for starters while Stand By option does relegate the computer to a power saving state, the essential components of the computer, the monitor and hard drive are switched off to save power. This results in the inability of the desktop configuration to save the opened documents and existing programs, thus in an event of a power failure you can lose unsaved data. However in case of a quick revert, ths is quite simple in case the computer is in a Standby mode. With a shake of a mouse or click of a keyboard you are up and running again.

This is in contrast to the Hibernate mode, which seeks to save an image of your desktop with all open files and documents, and then it powers down your computer. When you turn on power, your files and documents are open on your desktop exactly as you left them. This is especially useful when the users are away for long time. To use Hibernate in Windows XP, use this step by step process for manually activating hibernation in Windows XP.

Step1: Go to the Start menu and click on the Control Panel option. Select Power options from the tabs and click it. Under the power options, locate the Hibernate tab and select it. If there is no Hibernate tab then the power option is not available on your computer.

Step 2: Select the check box located next to the Hibernation option to activate this feature on your Windows XP.

This facility is also included in the Shut down menu in Windows XP which displays the Stand By, Restart and Turn Off buttons. To activate the Hibernate option, you need to Hold down the Shift key, and the Stand By button will change to Hibernate.

I’ve written a post on how to improve the hibernate / shut down time in Windows XP. Once you turn on the Hibernate feature, improving it’s efficiency will be the most efficient course of action.

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How Do I Turn Off / Disable Hybrid Sleep Mode In Windows 7, Vista

A great new feature introduced in the Microsoft Windows Vista is the “Hybrid Sleep” mode. This is a definite boost from the ordinary “Sleep” feature wherein the unsaved programs and other running programs on the computer were lost in case of a power outage. This was because the Sleep mode would serialize the current state into memory and then shut down all devices other than the RAM. This problem has now been resolved with the “Hybrid Sleep” mode in which the information is saved on the memory as well as a hibernation file similar to the “Hibernate” option.

This function is quite irrelevant for desktop users with UPS backup or those using laptops as these systems are configured to automatically go into hibernation or shutdown as soon as the battery has been reduced to a certain level. Moreover, switching to this feature resulted in the reduction of the performance of the Sleep feature. To turn off and disable the feature follow this step by step process.

Step 1: Click “Start” and select the “Control Panel” option. Redirected to the Control panel page, you need to select the “System and Maintenance” link to view the icon of “Power Options”. This runs the “Power Options Properties” applet.

Step 2: Click on “Select a power plan” tab, and under the “Preferred plans” section, select the option for “Change plan settings”.

Step 3: You are now redirected to the “Change settings for the plan” page. Now click on the “Change advanced power settings” option and under the “Advanced settings” tab, expand the button next to the “Sleep” tree followed by the expansion of the “Allow hybrid sleep” option. Select “Off” from the drop-down list as the value for both “On battery” and “Plugged in” options in your laptops. Click Ok and save the changes.

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Which Of The Two Is More Effective – Sleep Mode Or Hibernate In Windows XP?

The answer depends on what you are looking at:

Let’s say, if you are looking at quick retrieval to active state from inactive / temporary suspended state, then Sleep mode is more effective, as all the data will be readily available in the RAM and hence there is no need to process data from the computers hard drive, which will be the case if the computer is ‘hibernating’.

If you are concerned about data safety, then it’s definitely the hibernate feature that stands first. The reason for this is, the data is written on to hard drive, rather than temporarily being stored on the RAM. The disadvantage of storing data on RAM is that the data will be lost in case of power outage or an accidental shut down. If the computer is in ‘Hibernate‘ mode then all the data and state of the running programs will be stored i hard drive, which will ensure that the data will not be lost even in case of power outage.

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Is Sleep Mode Different From Hibernate Feature In Windows 7, Windows XP, Vista ?

Yes, Sleep Mode in Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 is different from Hibernate feature which Windows provides. Both are means of temporarily suspending the functioning of your PC / Computer / Laptop, but there is a huge difference in the way each of them work in the background:

The difference is the way in which the program, data and state of the program is stored an retained.

In Sleep mode, the memory (RAM) of the system is used to store the state or data of the program.

In Hibernate mode, the state / data of a program that is running is saved to the hard drive of the system / computer / laptop.

The way the data is stored and retrieved later on plays an important role in deciding which feature you’d want to use.

Related reading:

Hybrid Sleep in Windows 7

How to hibernate in windows XP

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What Is Hibernate In Computers ? How Can I enable Hibernate Feature In My Laptop / Computer

‘Hibernate’ feature in a computer is something like a temporary shut down, however it is different from shut down in the sense, once a computer is resumed to normal state from Hibernate, the same processes that were running before the system was ‘hibernate’d will be resumed.

Internally when a system is put to hibernate, an image of current working state is written on to a file on the hard drive and when the computer resumes from hibernation, it reads the saved state data from the file on the disk and restores the system to the same state. ie.. programs that were opened are resumed and network connections are restarted without losing any kind of data that were previously opened.

Hibernate in comparison to Standby takes a bit longer time, as it needs to write to a special file on the hard drive. Hibernate also takes bit longer to resume, since it must go through essentially normal boot process and read from the file on the hard disk. Hibernate is different from Standby as it is almost like temporary shut down.

To enable Hibernate feature follow the steps:
1) Go to Control Panel.
2) Double click “Power Options”
3) From the Power Options window select ‘Hibernate’ tab.
4) Select ‘Enable hibernation’ and click Apply.

There is also another procedure to enable Hiberate feature on your computer. Steps are
1) Click on Start and then click Run.
2) Type “powercfg.cpl” and hit Enter.
3) Now from “Power Options” window selct ‘Hibernate’ tab.
4) Select ‘Enable hibernation’ and click Apply.