Laptops are great devices; they have essentially transformed the way we use Windows. But if you are rather looking for an arrangement where you want to use your portable laptop as a desktop connected to a monitor, you are going to face a few issues. While recently trying to achieve this for a friend, we were not able to wake up the laptop from sleep while the lid was closed. If you are facing the same issue and are looking for a solution, check out the post below.

The setup that we were trying to achieve was a Windows 11/10 laptop connected to a monitor via HDMI. And we hooked a wireless keyboard and mouse and the laptop was tucked away nicely in a vertical stand (with the lid closed). So, when the computer will go to sleep after a few minutes, it was practically impossible to wake it up using an external keyboard/mouse and without opening the lid.

There are a few solutions that we tried and finally covered in this post. So, make sure you follow all of these to achieve your goal. Before we proceed, we assume that you want to wake up your laptop using an external USB device like a wired/wireless keyboard, mouse and etc. o have two options:

1. Using Device Manager
2. Via BIOS settings.

1] Using Device Manager

The most basic setting that you need to configure is to allow your device to wake up your computer.

To do so, open Device Manager and under Mice and other pointing device locate your external wired/wireless mouse.

Go to Power Management tab and tick the checkbox that says Allow this device to wake the computer.

Make sure you repeat the same steps for the keyboard as well or any other USB device for which you want to achieve this setup. To test these settings, put your laptop to sleep and try to wake it up from the mouse or any other desired device. If it did not work out for you, you might want to follow the next procedure mentioned below.

2] Using BIOS Settings

If the above steps did not work out for you, no need to revert them. Rather you can follow the steps mentioned in this section. A possibility is that this feature has been disabled in BIOS settings of your laptop. So, you need to enter BIOS and enable this setting for the above steps to work.

On an Acer laptop, we managed to enter BIOS by pressing F2 when the computer is booting up. Inside the BIOS, enabling the setting called Wake on USB while lid closed achieved our purpose. Although the steps we’ve mentioned here are for an Acer laptop, a similar setting/procedure is available for all modern laptops. If you own a rather old laptop and are not able to find this setting inside BIOS, then probably your laptop does not support it.

So, this was all about a desktop-like setup on a laptop. If you have faced the same issue and this post helped you fixed, do let us know in the comments.

Now read: How to run Laptop with the lid closed in Windows?