How to turn off laptop LCD screen manually

Whenever your laptop is not in use you turn off the LCD screen. The main reason to turn the screen off is to save at least some power and prolong the charge in the battery. Even if the laptop is plugged in, it will save tiny amount of electricity and also possibly leaving the laptop slightly cooler all help in their own small way.

If you are using your Laptop with external displays, you might want to use it with the display off but the lid open at some point. If so, today’s tip should help you accomplish this goal, with different ways to do so.

You can do this with the laptop lid shut, avoiding the heat that might build up in there is probably worth leaving the screen up, right? Leaving the screen up with the display off will let heat leave the laptop through the keyboard, and will allow the graphics processor give all of it’s power to the external screen, which is helpful if you’re working on graphics-intensive applications.


The Power Options in Windows have a setting to turn off the monitor after set amount of minutes when your computer is idle. While this works, setting it to kick in too fast can be annoying because you don’t want the screen to go off when in the middle of reading something. The best option is to manually turn off the laptop’s LCD screen as and when you want to.

Some laptops have a shortcut F key combined with the Fn key to turn the LCD screen off and then by pressing any key will turn it back on. Unfortunately Fn key or combination key that can be used to manually turn off the LCD screen doesn't exist on all laptops. Maybe your keyboard has issues and the Fn key is not working and there is no way to replicate that key other than changing the whole keyboard which could cost big amount.

If you want to leave your laptop for a few minutes but don’t want to put it to sleep because you are downloading any file from the Internet or listening to an audio book or some music while travelling and you are unable to turn the screen off manually using any keyboard function to save a bit of power, you can use this tools to turn off your laptop’s LCD screen manually.

1. Monitor Off Utility

Monitor Off Utility tools works with simple double click to turn off the laptop lcd screen. It also has a options on how and when you want to do it. You can create a hotkey for turning off the screen and also another one for switching on the screensaver.

In addition there are also options to enable the Windows Lock Screen before the screen goes into standby and a delay countdown which will popup on the screen and give you a countdown of time to the screen turning off.

Compatible with Windows 98/2000/ME/XP/Vista/7
This program requires the .NET Framework 2.0 or later.

Download Monitor Off Utility

2. Monitor Energy Saver (MonitorES)

Monitor ES is a small executable utility that doesn’t require installation, just launch and leave it run while you want to use it.  Monitors are turned off when you lock your computer using “Win+L”, Ctrl+Alt+Del & Lock”, alternatively you can use “Ctrl+F2″ to turn off the display. Select if you want the monitor to turn off or enable screen saver mode.

This is a very neat utility that helps you save money and help the environment. The extra feature of setting IM status to away and pausing media is a nice addition. The media players supported include iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, AIMP, Media Player Classic and several more. The messaging programs supported are Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Miranda and Digsby.

Compatible with Windows XP/Vista/7

Download Monitor Energy Saver (Monitor ES)

3. Sleeper

 

When you want to let the notebook screen sleep, Sleeper is one the simplest tools you can get. This tool, developed by freeware developer, TheFreeWindows, weighs around 790KB. However, the action of the tool is similar to that of Turn Off LCD. Just as you did in the case of Turn Off LCD, you can extract and double-click on the .exe file to turn off screen of the device, and hence to save money. Despite having no additional features to confuse you, Sleeper would be an ideal tool to use.

Download Sleeper

4. BlackTop

Resembling the case of Turn Off LCD, BlackTop is a single-click tool to turn off the laptop screen manually! However, in this tool, you can keep the shortcut in the taskbar. When do you want to turn off the screen, you have to just use the hotkey – Ctrl+Alt+B – and the screen will be turned off in seconds. Also, when do you want to resume your work, you can hit any of keys or use touchpad to turn on the screen.

Download BlackTop

We hope these tools would be quite useful for all of you, Do you use any other tool to turn off the screen? Do let us know about those tools if they have some unique features.