Windows – Close lid to sleep just about and open lid to wake up asap without requiring password if done soon enough

laptoppower-managementsleepwindows 8windows 8.1

I am sure at some point this tablet-like laptop was doing the thing I've briefly described in the title. That is, within the first couple of months that I've started using this thing.

I am using a Samsung Ativ 7 notebook (XE700T1C) on Windows 8.1. I was probably still using Windows 8 when my computer behaved like that. Let me describe it a little further:

Closing the lid was putting my computer on a sleep-like state, sleep-like because it was slightly different than what happens when I press/pressed the power button which puts my computer into a state that I really know as sleep. Here are the two and only differences I've noticed, that I'm missing:

  • Opening the lid back on during that state used to wake my computer up. For example,
    • If I were to press the power button and then close the lid, opening the lid wouldn't wake the computer up.
    • If I were to just directly close the lid, opening the lid would wake the computer up.
  • Getting up from that state didn't require me to draw my password, swiping the lock-screen up was enough.
    • Same side-notes apply to this one as well.

So it was like a mixture of sleep state and the display turned off state. Like the sleep state, the power light was off, the music would stop and computer seemingly put to sleep. Like the display turned off state, it would require only the lock-screen to be swiped up to get back on the track. And there's also the waking up as the lid gets opened functionality.

Are there settings to change, registry keys to edit to achieve this? Or was it just a magical state that won't ever come back?

Best Answer

If you pull out the right sidebar and pick settings, there's a menu item to go to your Control Panel. From there, access power options, and change your current plan settings. In the plan settings, you can adjust advanced options via the menu on the left.

From what I understand, under "Power buttons and lid" you will want to set the lid option to Sleep, and set the Power Button action to Hibernate.
If you want the lid option to transition into the power button option, you'll also want to go to "Sleep" and either enable Hybrid Sleep or set a timer for "Hibernate after" (which starts counting from when the computer is idle, not when it goes to sleep).
And you will also want to set require password on wake to off as well.

This should get you to your desired configuration. Unless you're running Windows 8 RT; I haven't even seen one of those so no idea how different they are.

Some elaboration:
Sleep puts your computer in a low power state, feeding power only to RAM and input devices, with periodic mini-wakes to check on scheduled tasks. Any action from input devices will wake the computer (which includes opening the lid). Waking from this state is usually faster, as your computer's state is still in RAM, and the computer only needs to reinitialize your other devices.
Hibernate saves your computer state to disk, and powers everything off. The only way to "wake" from this point is to power on the device. It takes a little longer to wake because it must read everything off disk into memory, and disk is the slowest data device.

Additionally, sleep usually doesn't need a password because it functions more like a screen saver than a screen lock. Hibernate requires password because it's as if you rebooted your computer, except it reopened all your applications into the state before power-off.

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