Windows, of course, lets you specify some amount of time to wait before turning off your screen.  But, here’s a utility you can use to turn off your screen right away.

Head over to Jim Chevalier’s downloads page and grab Monoff4.  If you just run it, it will give you a one-time configuration to allow you to select the power-off mode.  Then, running it makes the screen just power off.  It wakes up when you move the mouse or bang on the keyboard.

Oh, the reason I finally got around to looking for a solution to this is that since I installed Windows 7, my screen has not been shutting off after the 1 hour I told it to wait — it just goes black, with the backlight still on.  This utility properly shuts off the screen.

If you’d like to also have your Windows session lock when you turn off the screen, grab LockWS from the same page, and set up a batch file like this:

@echo off
start Monoff4.exe
LockWS

(It seems that if I try to launch Monoff4 without the “.exe“, it brings up the configuration screen again.)

You can create a shortcut to this batch file and pin it to your Start menu, or wherever you like, for when you would just like the screen off.

That’s all for today!