The latest viral trend? Refusing to close your laptop while walking to and from meetings — even through airports! — because you’re afraid that your AI agents will shut down. Nonsense! Windows can prevent that from happening.
Here’s what’s going on: AI-obsessed techies are moving through the world while their AI agents work busily at their own virtual desks, carrying their open laptops around like pizzas. By default, closing your laptop sends it into sleep or hibernation mode, terminating those AI agent processes before they’re finished. Poof! Useful work, gone.
And yes, by default they may have something to worry about. But there’s an easy Windows setting that keeps your laptop churning away even with the lid closed.
How to prevent your Windows laptop from shutting down when closed
People are so passionate about productivity that they’re actively worried about their AI sessions unexpectedly shutting down, forcing them to recreate their prompts and the resulting output. That’s led to people refusing to shut their laptops, awkwardly carrying them by their edge or upright like they’re serving a table a plate of food.
Cloud-based tools can run independently–even with your laptop closed. Local implementations like Claude Code Desktop work directly with local files while preserving the tooling and configuration of existing projects. That’s made local AI the preferred method for many people.
Even OpenAI has jumped on the trend.
Still, it’s an easy fix. Simply go to your Windows 11 Settings menu (Settings > System > Power & Battery) and scroll down to the “on battery” section. Ensure the “Closing the lid will make my PC” option is configured to “Do Nothing.” Presto! Your PC and its processes will keep on running.
Is it as simple as all that? Generally, yes, though you’ll want to consider two other things.
First, scroll up on the same page to “Screen, sleep, and hibernate timeouts.” You’ll see two options: “Plugged in” and “On battery.” Open the drop-down menu under “Make my device sleep after” and make sure it’s set to Never.” Otherwise, your laptop will enter sleep mode after a period of inactivity. Many laptops default to a few minutes, so checking this setting can prevent any potential problems.
Note that turning your screen off shouldn’t affect any background processes, though putting your laptop to sleep will. (Turning your screen off by closing the lid has been one of the traditional use cases for “battlestation” setups, which allows a Thunderbolt dock to light up multiple external displays.)
There’s one final thing to consider: proximity sensing. Your laptop may be trying to detect if you’re nearby, and then lock itself or put itself to sleep if it thinks you’re out of range or it can’t actively see you. That’s a setting that will vary by laptop, but it’s one you should check for, in case you notice that it still goes to sleep after adjusting the above settings.
OK, so your laptop is set to keep churning away, regardless of what’s happening. Problem solved, right?
Not always. The trend of keeping your laptops slightly open has one thing going for it: keeping your laptop out of its bag allows its fans to work efficiently, and running one or more agents will probably keep it running at full speed. If it’s out in the open air, its fans will circulate efficiently.
Inside your laptop bag, there’s no cool air to pull in. Instead, air will be sucked in, warmed by your CPU and/or GPU, then expelled into your bag. That warmed air will then be sucked back in, reheated, and… you get the idea.
Eventually, your laptop will shut down. Your laptop’s thermal sensors will force it to clock down into a lower-performance mode. To protect it from damage, your laptop will initiate an emergency shutdown to prevent its components from being damaged. It’s even more of a concern with a laptop with a discrete GPU, which will overheat even more quickly. Microsoft manufactured several Surface devices with this problem, so I know from experience what the issue is.
So all those TikTok and Instagram AI users showing off that awkward way of carrying their laptops around by hand? Well, maybe just carrying it is a smart idea… but open? No way.