I have my Dell Laptop hooked to my 52inch Sony LCD so it sits in the entertainment center most of the time. Problem is I don't want to leave it turned on all the time and hitting the power button under the lid is kind of a pain since there really isn't much room to open the lid when it's sitting on the shelf.

Sooo, my laptop is a 6000 and it has a few buttons on the front for media playback (play pause, ff, rew, etc...) I never have (or probably ever will) use those so I opened up the case and hardwired the power button under the lid to the big "Play" button up front. It wasn't really too hard to do, but you will need some basic soldering skills, and a multimeter to find where to solder to for both the main switch and the play button switch. Also, I used some old IDE ribbon cable to make routing the wires easier.

It worked out great however I noticed the laptop wouldn't power up unless the lid was opened. After a certain point in the bootup process the lid could be closed again, but if it is closed too soon the boot would fail and it would shut down again. That was fairly annoying, so I researched it found out the lids "switch" is actuated by a magnet and hall sensor near the touchpad. I removed the LCD bezel and simply took out the magnet that was glued on there. Now the laptop thinks the lid is open all the time which is great as now it powers up or wakes up no problem...

Anyways just wanted to share those couple of mods in case anyone else is having similar annoyances. I can provide more specific details if anyone wants em...

Very cool, you get an A for ingenuity. Good job

This was already in two guides, one here:
And one here: (pointing to the above thread actually)
Both guides are very good
Mind you, no one said actually remove the magnet, so that's new at least