Many people learn to live with the default behavior of what happens when you press the power button or what happens when you close the lid to your notebook. However, you can customize these things yourself:

From the control panel you will find these features by selecting “Power Options” and then “System Settings”.

Control Panel > Power Options > System Settings

“When I press the power button:” and “When I close the lid:” are both presented with options that will allow you to dictate different behavior with you are running on batteries or not. So, maybe if I close my lid and I’m plugged into the wall I don’t want it to do anything. That is an option. In fact, for batteries or when plugged in you can choose that it do nothing, sleep, hibernate or shut down.

You can also choose to have Windows Vista require a password when waking back up. By default (and recommended) is that this be set to require a password. However, if you keep your notebook in your house and find this more of an annoyance than a security feature you can disable the logon requirement here.

Some of the actions cannot be changed until you click the “Change settings that are currently unavailable” link, which prompts your for admin access to the system.