Instant off for laptop display

I often want to turn off my laptop display without sleeping it or closing the lid. I may be listening to music and either don’t need the display or don’t want to drain the battery. I could be in a meeting and want to temporarily eliminate the distracting display without waiting the two minutes for power saving to dim the screen.

Shopping for laptops the other day, I saw a Sony that includes a hardware button to instantly turns off the display. Brilliant! Why don’t all laptops have that useful feature? (If you’re on a Macintosh, Ctrl+Shift+Eject will turn off your display.)

Fortunately, I found two free utilities to perform this function. Each instantly turns off a Windows laptop’s LCD display:

• Turn Off LCD
• MonitorOff

Neither requires installation. Just save the executable to somewhere accessible such as your desktop, or save it anywhere and place a shortcut to it in the Start menu. Launching the executable turns off the screen, moving the mouse or clicking any key turns it back on.

I have both on my laptop, and they work equally well. They use different methods to accomplish their task, but the result is the same. The only visible difference is that Turn Off LCD fires up a command window which can be seen for a split second before the screen goes black, while MonitorOff is instant. The difference is only a split second, so either is a good choice.

I dragged the icon onto the Quick Launch bar in the Windows taskbar, for single-click launching. You could also use a hotkey or macro utility to launch MonitorOff or Turn Off LCD from a keyboard shortcut.