I’ve underlined it: Choose what closing the lid does.Ĭlick on that option to see how your system’s set up:
There are a number of useful settings here, but you want to look closely on the left. If you’re just running on battery, the tiny electrical plug won’t be present.Ĭlick on the icon and a helpful window pops up:Ĭlick on “More power options” on the bottom for the super-useful shortcut. See it? In this case my laptop is plugged in, so there’s a tiny plug adjacent to the battery as it charges. On the right side of your Taskbar look for the battery icon: 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. 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!įortunately like all Windows systems, Win7 allows you to fine tune the behavior associated with your laptop pretty easily.
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.
