Fix: Close lid on laptop changes screen resolution

I’ve got a Dell Precision M65.  It rocks.  Dual core.  2gb’s of RAM with room for up to 4gb.  Two hard drives.  Virtual Server 2005 R2 just plain screams.

Last week I downloaded and installed all the updated drivers from Dell after I started getting some blue-screens related to my wifi driver and video driver.  Since updating, I haven’t gotten any more blue-screens but I got this new, weird anti-feature: whenever I close the lid on my laptop, the screen resolution temporarily changed to 800×600 and resized all the windows and messed with the window layout.  It’s not a real debilitating issue but it’s irritating. 

Dell’s tech support was (surprisingly) unhelpful on this one.  I found the answer in a Dell support forum for a different kind of laptop.

Go into the registry (regedit.exe).  Go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlVideo] and find all the keys named “LidBehavior“ anywhere under this folder.  (HINT: once I got to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlVideo], I had to drill down 2 or 3 levels in a couple different places.  I found 2 LidBehavior keys.)  For each LidBehavior, change the value from 11 to 10.  Reboot.  Problem solved.

Big thanks to Jim Barry for this one.

-Ben