Thinkpads Forum

I work in a corporate environment with approximately 1500 Thinkpad's being used. We currently have them set so that if the laptop is plugged in or docked and the lid is closed they DO NOT go to sleep. If they are running on battery power and the lid is closed they are set to sleep. However, if the users laptop was docked or plugged in and the lid was closed while they worked (external monitor and such) when they undock, thus switching to battery power, the laptop does not go to sleep. Users are notorious for undocking their laptops and throwing them in their bag without verifying it has gone to sleep. Because of this we get a lot of HDD read errors/bad sectors/failed drives, systems shutdown improperly due to run down batteries.

I'm curious if there is a way so that if the system switches to battery power while the lid is closed it would put itself self to sleep. I have been searching but so far have been unable to find an answer to this.


EDIT: I should mention we are running Windows 7 SP1 Enterprise Edition on a variety of models, from R400 to X230 and pretty much everything in between. we are as up to date with drivers and software as we can be.

Welcome to the forum.
Personally I think it is a bad idea to close the lid on any laptop and just let the machine run on!
Methinks that the laptop should at least go to Standby/Sleep, when you close the lid.
That way, if the laptop gets undocked, at least nothing should change.
A second method might be to teach everybody to press Fn+F4 (i.e. go to Standby) BEFORE they close any lid!

I wish it was as easy as teaching the users proper usage of the laptops. Unfortunately, with so many users in our environment, getting them to follow any type of direction is next to impossible. Trust me, we've tried. Invariably the higher ups always cave to the user and have us make the systems work around them. It's rough, I know. welcome to "Corporate America".

If there's no way to do this, that's fine. I was just thinking about this the other day and was hoping for a solution. I have a hard time believing I'm the first to ask this question.

There are general power management settings, as well as policy settings.
See Power Manager Deployment Guides here:
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/guides- ... MIGR-72945
and here:
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... ide_en.pdf
With them you should be able to update the settings on all your 1500 Thinkpads from a central point!

What my experience has taught me about power management features is that, no matter how tweaking and debug goes into them, they are still finicky and never work at 100% reliability or even close to that. There are just too many components - HW, FW, SW, OS, driver involved, and no matter how the policy is set, it's still sometimes going to misfire.

So the solution, it - simplify. Either set the policy to always put the laptop to sleep with the lid closed (and teach the users to leave it open when docked), or set it to do nothing at all times (and teach the users to always manually put turn it off / put it to standby before placing it in a bag).

I'd say dr_st has it basically covered with the first suggestion: set the group policy to always sleep when the lid is closed (battery or AC). However, I would also follow that with a hibernate after one or two hours, in case the employee forgets about it. Users should quickly realize that in order to continue working with a docked system, they'll need to leave the lid slightly cracked open; essentially a self-teaching lesson. Unless they're using a low monitor stand and putting the laptop underneath it, I don't see any problem.

You're IT. You should be able to convince management that doing it this way will save $$$ and down time in the long term.