Turn Off your monitor using shortcut from desktop
There’s an option in Windows XP power management that allows you to set a period of time, after which your monitor will be turned off. (which is more like Standby given that a shake of the mouse will awaken it).
Here is a way about creating a shortcut that will allow you to do the same?
OK you can have two ways to do this
1.Use this widget for Yahoo! Widgets Engine OR Konfubulator
2.Another way is to download a standalone program that is built for this
Check out the page http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html
1. Download the ZIP file (link is at the end of that page).
2. Extract it to a temp folder.
3. Run nircmd.exe file.
4. Click “Copy to Windows directory”, click Yes.
5. Now, right-click desktop (or inside any folder like Start Menu, Programs, Quick Launch) and select New>Shortcut.
6. Enter “nircmd monitor off” or “nircmd monitor low” (no quotes please) (I don’t know the difference between them. Experiment.).
7. Click Next, and enter “Turn Off Screen” or anything you like as shortcut name. (no quotes). Click Finish.
8. Right-click the shortcut you created, and click “Properties”. Click “Change Icon”
9. If a message “The file %windir%\nircmd.exe contains no icons.” (or similar) appears, click OK.
10. Choose a nice icon (In WinXP, I use the “blue power icon” of shell32.dll file).
11. Click OK. Click OK again.
12. Try out the new shortcut to get a feel of it!

thanks a lot for the guide…hehe…
Or just use this one:
http://koding.co.uk/index.php?page=monoff
.exe files that does the same.
(no virus! – I’ve tryed it)
Nice tip!
Better than Koding’s MonOff because there’s no command prompt window.
It’s smooth.
Perfect! Thank you!
nice one. thank you. just what i needed.
Thanks,
I’ve noticed on my notebook that ‘monitor off’ shortcut only turns off light on lcd screen, image is still visible under the right angle, but ‘monitor low’ completely turns off screen.
shareware for the job at
http://www.rtsoftwares.com
I’m a programmer and I knew how to do this, so I’d rather make the program myself
Thanks for the idea anyway, and for this topic, I do recommend this nifcmd.exe
To the programmers out there, Keep it simple guys.
Cheers to all, and happy computing
nice work
thank you so much
Nice technique! One strange behavior though. There appears to be a 1 minute interval between using the command once and then using it again. If you try to use the command again before 1 minute has passed from turning the screen back on, the screen goes black for a second and then turns right back on again. If you wait more than 1 minute, it works again just fine. Odd.
Really cool. I use it in conjunction with Launchy so I can just hit Alt-Spacebar and type “monitor”. Gotta love that.
Great work
it’s work with vista
thx
I’ve written an open source project, MonitorOff, hosted at SourceForge.net. It’s a plenty small (26K) exe.
Cool…
hm. good one )
thank you very much, very useful.
I added a wait command to be able to use “Shortcut key” to initiate the command.
“%windir%\nircmd.exe cmdwait 1000 monitor off”