How to Use Any Laptop With the Lid Closed
Most of the time, you’ll want to use your laptop when it’s open: you have full access to the keyboard and trackpad as input devices, as well as the attached display, which may or may not be there. with touch screen capabilities.
However, when you’re at home or in the office, you may want to connect your laptop to a separate monitor, keyboard, and mouse—potentially meaning you’ll have more screen real estate to work with and a larger keyboard to use. in, and it may well help improve your posture while you’re at your desk.
However, to use your laptop this way and in closed-lid mode, you’ll have to adjust some settings – otherwise your laptop will think it’s no longer needed and will go into sleep mode when you close the lid.
To begin, connect all the various peripherals to your laptop: On both Windows and macOS, devices such as keyboards, mice, and monitors should be detected immediately and automatically start working so that you can close the laptop’s lid. when you’re ready.
Windows Settings
If you’re working on a Windows laptop, this is one of those times when you need to dig into the old Control Panel to get the operating system to work the way you want. At the time of writing, the relevant options haven’t been moved to the modern Settings panel, so find Control Panel in your taskbar, then launch it.
Select Hardware and Sound , then Power Options , and then Choose what closing the lid does (left). Next to the “When I close the lid” heading, you’ll see two options: one for when your laptop is running on battery power, and another for when your laptop is plugged in. One or both of these options must be set to Do Nothing . so that you can use the laptop with the lid closed. Click Save Changes to confirm.
When it comes to making sure your external display works properly, you can access these options from the regular Settings panel, accessible through the Start menu or by pressing Win + I on your keyboard. Select System and then Display , and on the next screen you can verify that your external monitor is turned on and set to the correct resolution.
macOS settings
If you’re using a MacBook connected to an external display and a separate keyboard and mouse (or trackpad), the latest versions of macOS should recognize this and act accordingly: you may see the external monitor briefly blink and refresh when you close the lid, but otherwise In this case, you can simply continue to use the laptop, provided that the second display and peripherals are detected.
If you open the Apple menu, then select System Preferences and then Battery & Settings , you’ll see a toggle switch that says “Prevent the power adapter from automatically putting you to sleep when the display is off .” If you enable this option, closing the lid of your MacOS laptop won’t put it to sleep as long as it’s connected to a power source—handy if, for example, you want ongoing downloads to continue but don’t have any accessories plugged into it. .
In System Preferences, you can also select Displays to configure the external display connected to your MacBook to be used when it is turned off. You can set the resolution, orientation, and color configuration of the second screen, and some monitors also allow you to adjust the refresh rate.