Illuminati-R-Us

I freely admit ignorance here.

My sister gave us her HP laptop at Xmas, and we use it a lot in the living room. It is too dark here to read the model name on the bottom, but it isn't that old, runs Windows 7, seems to do everything. Other than I need a new left click button on my mouse, it all seems to work. (Mouse has developed a hair trigger and will make multiple clicks if brushed) I have always used desk computers.

The question is about the lid/screen. If I hand it over to the wife, I like to fold the screen halfway down, just to keep the center of gravity more in the middle. But if I move it past vertical towards me, it quick crashes into a blank screen that won't recover. Turn it off and back on and all is fine. I would have thought I could close the lid while it was running, or at least that it would just go to sleep. But this kills it.

So, is this remotely normal for a lap top? Or do I have some breaking connection in the hinge portions between screen and bottom halves?


I keep a spare wireless mouse in the drawer, but I am anal enough I'll probably take this one apart and replace the microswitch under the left click.

Enzo wrote:I freely admit ignorance here.

My sister gave us her HP laptop at Xmas, and we use it a lot in the living room. It is too dark here to read the model name on the bottom, but it isn't that old, runs Windows 7, seems to do everything. Other than I need a new left click button on my mouse, it all seems to work. (Mouse has developed a hair trigger and will make multiple clicks if brushed) I have always used desk computers.

The question is about the lid/screen. If I hand it over to the wife, I like to fold the screen halfway down, just to keep the center of gravity more in the middle. But if I move it past vertical towards me, it quick crashes into a blank screen that won't recover. Turn it off and back on and all is fine. I would have thought I could close the lid while it was running, or at least that it would just go to sleep. But this kills it.

So, is this remotely normal for a lap top? Or do I have some breaking connection in the hinge portions between screen and bottom halves?


I keep a spare wireless mouse in the drawer, but I am anal enough I'll probably take this one apart and replace the microswitch under the left click.

A lot of them are designed to go to sleep when you fold the lid, but they should wake up again.

If you go to the power settings control panel, is there anything suspicious looking?

There is a system crashing power saving feature called "Hibernate" that basically writes a memory image to disk and then powers off. Then, on wake up, it should quickly restore you to the state you were in before. This, um, "feature" has never worked very well and would leave you dead as often as not. If this is what your laptop is doing it could explain what you're seeing.

I guess the first thing to check is what it thinks it is supposed to be doing. Here a short Microsoft video that may give you some ideas:
Change what happens when you close your laptop