I don't see why you need to close the lid at all, unless you're transporting it overnight like on a plane trip. I sleep my MacBook Pro at night, but I leave the lid open since it's on my desk and there is no real reason to close it if it's not moving from there and I'm just going to open it up again in the morning anyway. I leave it open and when I want to sleep it I just press the Power button and then the S button to hit the Sleep button. After that, there is no problem with any automatic wake/sleep setting you want to run, because it's open.
a brody wrote:
There are a few programs that will wake the machine while the lid is closed, but some have found this as the surest way to overheat their machines. The only time you might want to operate when the lid is closed with safety, would be if you attached an external display.
Again, that is only true if it was inside a case. If it was closed and the laptop is out in the open, there should not be an overheat hazard since that is the normal situation when running in lid closed mode. Still, I do not use or recommend those force-wake hacks.
a brody wrote:
Once nice advantage of MacBooks and MacBook Pros, also seen by iBooks and Powerbooks is that the brightness key will dim the screen all the way down. So you might want to just turn off Energy Saver, leave the lid open, and dim the screen the whole way down, if you need a dark room but still want to backup in the middle of the night.
I used to do this but it isn't necessary. Just hit the shortcut to sleep the screen. (Control Shift Eject on my MBP.) Or use the Exposé preference to set a corner as the "Sleep Display" corner and when you move the mouse there, bam the screen goes dark but the machine is still on. The advantages of these two methods is that you don't have to remember what setting the screen was on before you turned it to zero, and since they take effect instantly, they're faster than leaning on the brightness keys.
