It depends on the system load, how conservative the fan
throttling is in response to temp, and how the cooling
system is designed, plus some keyboards don't close anywhere
near air-tight.
If it's an issue, merely placing a wedge of some sort near
the front edge (not in contact with the screen portion
itself unless a very soft substance so as to not cause
scratches) to leave it open a slight bit may be sufficient.
If all else fails, turn down the backlight as much as
possible. That should help a bit by reducing power and tube
wear. The lighting system would be the weakest part, a
stationary laptop shouldn't wear out the rest before the
rest of the laptop is worn out.
Have you tried a newer driver? Sometimes those from an OEM
are a bit minimalistic and crippled. There are at least a
couple 'sites on the web that cater to modifying full ATI or
nVidia drivers to re-enable and validate their use on laptop
video. Intel I'm not so sure about, I've never had a cause
to hunt down such a driver for that case. nVidia drivers
can be found at
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com , I don't
recall the URL for ATI's drivers but a Google search should
find it. Note also that it's not necessarily the newest
driver you'd want, sometimes features are temporarily
disabled due to bugs only to be re-enabled later. Ask in
their forum if a version you try doesn't have what you need.
I'm expecting the necessary setting to be disabling one of
the two outputs through the driver interface (Display
Properties). Having done that you save screeen wear but you
still may not be able to disable the lid switch if the
laptop manufacturer did not allow for it to stay on with the
lid closed.
