TurnOffLCD - How To Manually Turn Off Notebook or Laptop LCD Screen
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Whenever I stop using my laptop but I decide to leave it turned on, I’ll make sure that I turn off the LCD screen.
Reason I do that is I think that maybe it will save a little electricity and also leave my laptop slightly cooler. The Power Options in Windows has a setting to turn off the monitor after X amount of minutes when your computer is idle. Setting it too fast can be annoying because I don’t want the screen to go off when I’m reading something. The best is to manually turn off my laptop’s LCD screen when I want to.
I have an Acer laptop which I can use the shortcut key FN + F6 to turn the LCD screen off and then by pressing any key will turn it back on. Unfortunately not every laptop as such Dell or HP has a basic button or combination key that can be used to manually turn off the LCD screen. It is also possible that the Fn key is not working and there is no way to replicate that key other than changing the whole keyboard which cost around $100.
Here is a simple and easy tool that you can use to manually turn off your laptop’s LCD screen.
There are times when you just want to listen to some music on your notebook/laptop and want the display(LCD) of your notebook to remain off while the lid is still open, while there are small amount of notebook manufacturer’s who provide this simple option of turning off the notebook’s LCD when not in use but many don’t.
Taimur Asad, developer of Turn Off LCD owns a HP DV2799 Special Edition notebook, while its a great notebook in almost every way it still lacks a basic button to switch off the display(LCD) whenever he wants to and not only this notebook but also many new & expensive notebooks lacks this option.
This has led the author developing his very own small application which turns off his notebook LCD just with one click. He wrote this application in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. It is basically a simple console based application that makes use of a DLL (User32.dll) file from Windows using System.Runtime.InteropServices namespace and then calls the required function.
This tool is very small, only 85KB is size and no installation required. All you need to do is just run executable file “Turn Off LCD.exe” whenever you want to turn off your LCD screen. To turn on the screen, simply hit any key on your keyboard or move your mouse.
Download:
TurnOffLCD v101 (link 1)
TurnOffLCD v101 (link 2)
