When I close my laptop lid, the screen shuts down and never comes back on, even when I hit the keyboard. Why??

Answer 1

It is on standby mode. You need to press the power button.

Answer 2

I agree it is probably in standby mode, and you do need to press the power button, I just wanted to add in your control panel/power options, you can set it to go into standby mode , hibernate or shutdown completly when you close the lid and/or standby for a while and then shutdown/hibernate in case you do not return

If you see one of the led's blinking while the lid is closed it is in going into standby mode

If you see "resuming windows" on the screen when it restarts it was in hibernation

if you see the regular startup screen at startup it was completly shutdown

In standby mode you will still have a small drain if you are on battery, this keeps the laptop in the state it was when you closed the lid, memory and cpu are still active in low power mode

In hibernation the contents of memory are written to a file on your harddrive and then the computer shuts off completly, when you restart it reads that file back into memory rather that going through the boot process so if you had any apps running or open work it will still be there

One thing worth noting, there has been some issues with standby and hibernation on a few machines, if your machine ever locks up and you cant get anywhere, hold down the power button for 5-10 seconds, this will force the power supply to shutdown and then try restarting, this works on a desktop as well

Answer 3

Try hitting enter once. Wait. If nothing happens hit enter again. It should work. If not, you may want to run your antivirus and antispyware programs. Good luck.