Preventing sleep when closing lid

Probably not without first hooking up an external keyboard, and be very careful of heating up too much in a closed bag, working away.

Joe

I haven't used this, but someone else bought this application to keep their Powerbook awake with the lid closed: http://www.alxsoft.com/mac/sleepless.html

Zamboknee: This is a *very bad idea*. It isn't just the very high probability that you'll overheat the Powerbook if you run it inside a bag; you also stand a good chance of either activating your Sudden Motion Sensor during recording and losing the recording completely, or if you don't have SMS, of wrecking your hard drive by moving or bumping the Powerbook while the drive is operating. Get yourself a proper digital recording device and forget about using your Powerbook that way.

Just FYI, I often record group meetings using an Olympus digital voice recorder with an extension microphone. It is just slightly larger than a cigarette lighter (about 1.5" by 3.5" by 0.25" thick), runs on a single AA battery, and records up to 16 hours of high-quality, digital audio in stereo (even longer in mono or in lower-quality settings). You can download the audio files through the built-in USB plug.

I have used this for a few years now with excellent success, recording WMA sound files that I'm able to send via email or FTP for transcripts of meetings. Also makes a great little note-taker when I'm driving and have a thought I don't want to forget. Cost me about $75 at Radio Shack, fits in a shirt pocket.

So, I noticed about these forums you get a lot of "erm, that's a problem" but not a lot of "That could be a problem but here's how you do it if you're stupid enough to still want to." While I appreciate the links to the 3rd party solutions I know I set my macbook to do this while it was still 10.4. Now that I have a new MacBook Pro I'm trying to find out how to keep this thing from going to sleep when I close the lid. Anyone know how to do that using the OS and not something I have to buy?

TwoMs: With a Powerbook and no third-party software, it simply can't be done, except in the manner Apple supports: with an external monitor, keyboard and mouse connected. With a MacBook or MBP, I don't know — that's why there are MacBook and MacBook Pro forums here. Why not post in one of them?