Snapping a laptop shut when you don't want people to see what you're writing.

Factual Questions
1

A few times I’ve seen this done on TV shows. But should you really do that? Will you lose any data that way, or harm the computer?

Or does the system magically save all your changes and then gracefully shut down?

2

snapping it closed will not shut it off. It may turn off the screen (perhaps some models go into sleep mode - i don’t know). the thing is that you are causing unnessessary stress to the hinge and screen and may cause premature failure.

3

ALos most laptops have something called hibornation mode which basically saves what is currently in memory to harddrive and powers down. When you power up the RAm is ‘re-loaded’ from that harddrive file - so you are exactly were you left off. Mine does it when I press the power button - it’s not inconceivable that some may do this when you close it. Also when the battery runs down to a critical level the laptop will go into this mode.

4

It depends on the laptop and the OS I imagine. But on my laptop (Macintosh) closing the lid just causes it to go into sleep mode. When I raise the screen again all the application windows are in the same state as before I lowered it. Unsaved documents are still unsaved.

5

My laptop, a gateway, can be configured to:

Do nothing

Shut Down

Hibernate

You get to choose. I’ve set mine up to do nothing.

6

I’d always save the document before closing the lid. I’ve seen laptops crash while trying to go into (or back out of) the sleep/suspend/hibernate/whatever mode. Particularly embarrassing when you walk up to do a presentation, open up the laptop and find it’s crashed.