Good practices for using external monitors with lids down?

[firstyearprof]

Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out what the proper practices are for using an external monitor with the MBP lid down. My monitor looks great, but I'm having problems with the MBP coming out of sleep mode after I unhook the monitor. For example, upon opening the MBP after having used it all day in lid down with the external monitor, the indicator light still shows that it is asleep, and it will not come back out of sleep. Sometimes if I wait long enough it comes out of sleep, but sometimes I'm forced to do a hard reboot.
Something similar was posted on an older thread, but no resolutions to the problem: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/344441/

One suggestion is to manually put the computer to sleep before unhooking the monitor - I'll give this a try and report back on the results over the next few days. Does anyone else have suggestions? Thanks in advance...

 

[odinsride]

are you hitting the spacebar or trackpad button to wake it from sleep?

 

[savar]

I go into the Video control panel...I think there's an option called "Find Sources" or something like that. It will reactivate the laptops built-in screen. Do this before you disconnect the external, obviously.

 

[firstyearprof]

figured it out

OK all. Wanted to give this long enough to make sure it works. For the last week I've been putting the computer into sleep mode before unhooking the external monitor. So far, everything's been A-OK: MacBook Pro comes out of sleep like it should. Hope this is helpful to anyone out there who was having similar issues....