How to lock Windows 10 when you close your laptop lid
When you close your laptop lid, your system can do one of three things; sleep, hibernate, or shutdown. All three options put your system in an ‘Off’ or similar state. The fourth option is that closing your lid does nothing. If you need to lock Windows 10 when you close your laptop lid, you’re going to need a third party app called Lid Lock.
Lock Windows 10
Lid Lock is free but it seems the developer’s website is down and you cannot download the app directly from them. Instead, you have to turn to software repositories. Softpedia has a copy that’s safe for use so go ahead and download the app from there.
The app runs in the system tray and adds a padlock icon to it. It has no configurable settings whatsoever. You can set it to start when you boot Windows 10, but that’s all there is to set up.
Close your laptop lid and your system will be locked. It will not enter sleep or hibernate mode, and it won’t shut down either. When you open your lid again, you will see the login screen where you will have to enter your PIN or password.
Now, locking your PC isn’t difficult. You can lock it with the Win+L keyboard shortcut and it will lock just fine. The reason you might want to lock Windows 10 when you close your laptop lid is because it’s faster and maybe, if for any reason, you need to slam your laptop lid closed you know it will result in your system locking and not going to sleep. Also, Windows 10 doesn’t have a great track record of coming out of sleep. It takes pretty long and on occasion something breaks and can only be fixed if you restart your system.
Windows 10 also lets you configure what happens when you press the power button but again the options don’t include locking your system. You can press the power button to put your system to sleep, shut it down, or use it to turn off your display.
Since we’re talking laptops here, it is worth mentioning that not all laptop keyboards have two Win keys, one on each side of the space bar, few laptops do and that makes it a bit more difficult to execute the Win+L keyboard shortcut. This is why closing the laptop lid is easier and maybe even a little intuitive for when you need to leave your desk or leave your desk quickly.
