Sujith John Abraham

October 21, 2006

Turn Off your monitor using shortcut from desktop

Filed under: Hardware, Microsoft, Reviews, Softwares, Tips — knight17 @ 7:36 pm

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!

 

10 Comments »

  1. thanks a lot for the guide…hehe…

    Comment by kurtbreak — June 17, 2007 @ 5:49 am

  2. 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)

    Comment by Fredrik — July 4, 2007 @ 6:36 pm

  3. Nice tip!

    Comment by Tyler — July 18, 2007 @ 7:12 pm

  4. [...] readings: 1 [...]

    Pingback by Lights Off, Laptop! at kepo-ing Zz85 — August 20, 2007 @ 11:27 am

  5. Better than Koding’s MonOff because there’s no command prompt window.
    It’s smooth.

    Comment by BenJr — September 27, 2007 @ 7:56 am

  6. Perfect! Thank you!

    Comment by Chris Canfield — October 17, 2007 @ 4:04 am

  7. nice one. thank you. just what i needed.

    Comment by ijin — October 30, 2007 @ 8:40 pm

  8. 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.

    Comment by Thunderoth@hotmail.com — January 17, 2008 @ 12:50 pm

  9. shareware for the job at
    http://www.rtsoftwares.com

    Comment by vikrant — March 12, 2008 @ 6:22 am

  10. 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

    Comment by fedmich — March 28, 2008 @ 4:07 pm

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