Windows 8 – How to Lock Laptop on Lid Close

lidlock-screenwindows 8

If my laptop is connected to power source and is not configured to sleep on lid close (it is connected to power source and is working, I don't want it to sleep. It's compiling my code) if I close the lid, laptop will do nothing. This works as expected, but actually if I have my laptop connected to power source in the office it will be good to lock it if I close a lid. So no one can just open the lid and see my unlocked desktop.

I searched Google and it says that correct use case is to manually lock laptop via Win + L every time before lid is closed. This is OK, but not very secure – after all, I can forget Win + L.

Is there any easy way (maybe some registry value or app) to configure windows laptop so it will lock on lid close even without sleep? Of course I can write app/powershell script for this task, but this is not suitable for non-programmers end users.

Best Answer

There is no built in way to do this, but you could use LidLock for this purpose. It is a GUI tool which can help you what you want to achieve. You can also set it to start automatically with Windows start-up.

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You can also set the timer for sleep/hibernate after locking the laptop.

You can read more about this on this article.

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Windows – Automatically lock screen on lid close in Windows 7

I believe you can change some registry settings to have the PC lock when you shut the lid:

Launch registry (start > regedit)
Local the following: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Power
Right Click > New > DWORD (32 bits)
Rename it to AwayModeEnabled
Select AwayModeEnabled > Right Click > Change value to 1 (hexadecimal)
Go to Power Options and change the lid close action to Sleep.

This should have 'tricked' the OS into locking the PC when the lid is closed (rather than putting this to sleep).

Please backup your registry before making any changes just in case you change the wrong thing.

Windows 8 – Fix Laptop Waking from Sleep with Lid Closed

You mentioned wireless devices in your bag. The laptop with the lid down can wake from sleep. After the time expires from no activity, the laptop goes to sleep. The length is determined by the power settings in the power control panel. This explains the battery drain, since the fan runs full speed to cool the CPU.

You could run cmd.exe as administrator to get around permission errors. But, this does not always work. A better solution is running psexec which makes you localservice. This does not have permission issues removing devices that wake from sleep.

Here is the link https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649.aspx or http://download.sysinternals.com/files/PSTools.zip to psexec, part of the Microsoft sysinternals.

Use

psexec -i -d -s cmd.exe

to gain access to localservice. From there run:

powercfg.exe /DEVICEQUERY wake_armed

It shows a list of devices that can wake the laptop from sleep. I did this on all my laptops. Each one had different devices that could wake it from sleep. Now, to be safe, I removed all of them so that nothing could wake it up. Remove as many as you like.

Run this command to remove a device:

powercfg.exe /DEVICEDISABLEWAKE "your device string goes here"

powercfg.exe /DEVICEDISABLEWAKE "HID-compliant mouse (001)"

I ran this for each one and verified by running

powercfg.exe /DEVICEQUERY wake_armed

again. This time I received None.

I have not had any of my laptops wake up since.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Automatically lock screen on lid close in Windows 7

Windows 8 – Fix Laptop Waking from Sleep with Lid Closed

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