[whismerhill]

O_o you start an unattended batch job without plugging the power ??
are you serious ?

also closing the lid generally overrides whichever software setting prevent sleep, depending on how it's set up for the particular device.

There's already software that prevents sleep :
-insomnia a little application that prevents sleep & does nothing else (intended for such situations as software which doesn't provide the functionnality)
-some download applications also have options to prevent sleep given that they need to finish downloading at some point ...
-most media players generally prevent sleep too (otherwise your computer might go to sleep in the middle of that movie, if you didn't touch any of the computer controls) ...


What's more you don't need a laptop to benefit from sleep, a desktop can be put to sleep with benefits : e.g. all your programs stay where they were and you can start over whatever you were working on on wakeup nearly instantly (with normal sleep, not deep sleep)