Hello lovely people 🙂
Has there been a time when you have wanted – or needed – a shortcut key that will allow you to easily turn off the monitor. I definitely have so that is why we will devote this computer repairs blog to doing exactly that.
While we can use the Win+L combination to lock the screen, it still leaves your monitor on. For anyone with multiple monitors it’s a pain to be turning off power buttons all the time.
To begin we’ll show you how to simply power off your monitor, and then how to both lock and power it off.
To create this shortcut, we’ll first need to grab a tiny multi-purpose utility from the folks at NirSoft called NirCmd. This is like a Swiss-army knife tool for your PC and it can perform an amazing array of tasks, including powering off the monitor. All we really need to do is create a shortcut to it.
Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose New Shortcut:
Then you’ll want to browse to the location where you saved the nircmd.exe file, and add the following arguments:
“C:pathtonircmd.exe” cmdwait 1000 monitor off
Make sure the path has quotes around it, and then you add the extra arguments, which will wait 1 second before powering off the monitor (otherwise Windows might misinterpret your last keystroke and wake back up).
Next you can go into the shortcut properties and assign a shortcut key, now just click Change Icon to pick a better one than the one there by default.
At least in Vista there is a great icon for turning off the monitor, just pick the one that looks *ugly* from the list below.
Naturally feel free to pick your own icon instead – but in this case, when the icon actually show up on your desk top it’s very bright, modern and shiny.
How to lock the Workstation Too
You can also create a shortcut that will both lock the workstation and turn off the monitor. Unfortunately the Nircmd way involves far more steps than necessary in Vista, so we have created a tiny executable called LockAndPowerDown.exe that will do both in one step.
To install it, simply download and extract the executable, and create a shortcut to it just as you did in the step above. To find the same icon, click on Change Icon, and then paste in “C:WindowsSystem32shell32.dll” into the browse box.
