You can sleep after n minutes of lid closed. I find this a good compromise of not toasting my laptop in a bag, and being able to head to a different room without losing any application state

Sleep doesn't lose any application state.

It does if your application state happens to include TCP connections. When Windows wakes, prior to powering up the NIC hardware, it sends all applications a notice indicating that the network is down so everything kills their network connections. This happens on my hardwired desktop. It's one thing if the device can potentially be roaming and changing networks while the system is asleep. But for a wired network connection it's BS.

>It does if your application state happens to include TCP connections.

That's not really what's meant by state though...

It’s what I mean. Losing the TCP session is more or less the only thing I care about with my vpn, ssh, and occasional cifs session. A dead putty window is 98% useless.

Sleep isn't supposed to lose any application state, but I've certainly had many issues before with applications freaking out after waking up from sleep, on both a Mac and Windows machines. Sometimes it seems like more of an issue with the way the application handles sleep/network interruptions etc, but the end result is still the same.

There is another comment floating around on this thread about how expecting network state to be preserved after sleep is unreasonable; when the system wakes up most likely its open connections will be stale. Might as well close them gracefully at sleep time.

You can have the power button put the computer to sleep. So, close the lid --> lock the screen; press the power button --> go to sleep. So you don't have to open the lid, log in, put to sleep, close the lid, put in bag- just open lid, push button, put in bag.

True. In those instances, I would manually put it to sleep via the Start Menu button.

However, I've had my laptop wake up from Sleep while in a bag several times, causing it to overheat. That pissed me off. If I recall correctly, I think it was a Bluetooth event causing it to wake up.