How to Keep a Windows Laptop Awake With the Lid Closed

While your laptop obviously works great on-the-go, you can use it at home too. By connecting an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor, a laptop can function like a desktop. But there’s one problem with this: how do you keep the laptop on when it’s closed?

By default, Windows puts your laptop to sleep when you close the lid. This means that even if you don’t want to use your laptop screen as a secondary monitor, you still have to keep it open to keep your computer awake.

Or do you? Thankfully, you can keep your monitor on when the laptop is closed. Here’s how.

How to Keep the Display On When Your Laptop Is Closed

Windows provides a simple toggle to let you keep your laptop screen on when it’s closed. Find it through the following steps:

1. In the System Tray (at the bottom-right corner of the screen), find the Battery icon. You may have to click the small arrow to show all icons. Right-click Battery and choose Power Options.
   1. Alternatively, on Windows 10, you can head to Settings > System > Power & sleep and select Additional power settings from the right menu.
2. On the left of the resulting Power Options menu, select Choose what closing the lid does.
3. You’ll see options for the power and sleep buttons. Under When I close the lid, change the dropdown box for Plugged in to Do nothing.
   1. If you like, you can also change the setting for On battery. However, this can cause issues, as we’ll explain in a moment.
4. Click Save Changes and you’re good to go.

Image credit: Ben Richards/SuperUser

Now when you close your laptop screen, it will continue to run as normal. This means that you can control it with external devices while the laptop itself is neatly tucked away.

However, remember that when you want to put your laptop to sleep or shut it down, you’ll need to use the commands on the Start Menu once you’ve made this change. You can also use the physical power button on your computer to turn it off.

Beware of Heat When Closing a Laptop Without Sleeping

That’s all you have to do in order to close your laptop without it sleeping. However, changing this option has a consequence that you should know about.

The default shortcut for closing the lid to put your PC to sleep is convenient when you throw your laptop in a bag. But if you forget about that after changing this option, you could accidentally put your laptop in an enclosed space while it’s still on.

In addition to wasting battery power, this will generate a lot of heat and can destroy your laptop over time. Thus, you should consider only changing the lid setting for Plugged in and always plugging in your laptop when you use it at your desk. This is a good combination of convenience and safety.

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