I use a middle of the road laptop as my imaging computer. Outside of my normal gripes with Windows, it has been a real pain in the ass making it work as a computer when you close the laptop lid. Especially with my Nexdome, I want the laptop to operate normally while closed so that light and reflections aren’t introduced into the telescope from the monitor. There are many power settings in the various Windows settings pages, and none of them seem to work as expected. Between reducing power usage for various devices and not even drawing some windows at all, getting it to work as it normally should has been a pain. Here is the solution I found on a StackOverflow question:
- Open Device Manager.
- Find System Devices -> ACPI Lid.
- Go to the Driver tab of it, and click Update Driver.
- Choose “Browse my computer” and “Let me pick.”
- Uncheck “Show compatible hardware.”
- Choose Microsoft from the manufacturer and look for “Volume Manager” as the driver.
- Restart the system.
This seems to cause the ACPI Lid device to not work, since it loads an incorrect driver. Windows can’t tell if the lid is closed or not, and, therefore, it doesn’t apply any power and device changes when the lid is closed. Since I don’t use this laptop for much else than just imaging, this shouldn’t affect me. I almost never use the laptop not plugged in.
