Some Sony Vaio's and other laptops have a dedicated button to turn off the screen leaving everything else working normally, this is useful when you just want to listen to some music while doing something else or other stuff... If you don't have that functionality and don't want to hack your hardware and miss with the cables here's the solution... Taimur Asad, a programer from "redmondpie", wrote a small C# app that make use of some Windows APIs to just do that, it's an old post by him but it's sad that a lot of people can't find that app.. Tested on all Windows versions and reported to work perfectly, i my self using it on my 8.1 x64... Download: Spoiler View attachment TurnOffLCDv101.zip Original post: Spoiler redmondpie com/turn-off-your-notebook-lcd-with-one-click
Yes, just move the mouse or press anything, i even managed to turn it on by inserting a USB drive!!..
I needed this functionality for my laptops as well but I needed/wanted to be able to do it via the Control key.. don't ask me why, I just did.. and any program that uses hotkeys does not let you set a hotkey on -only- the control key.. so a custom solution was required... and thus created.. So if anyone has a need to be able to turn off their LCD via the control key, I'll give you my software. Or if you are so inclined to do it yourself, I can help you out with the coding and what API's to use.
Yeah you can try it out.. it's very simple.. it runs in the system tray (with a generic icon that i quickly chose, I never looked for a more relevant icon I just needed something quickly)... and when you press the Control key, your monitor will turn off. Move the mouse, press a key, etc, to turn it back on. It's almost like a "boss key" to just quickly black out your screen... only it uses the control key like I said.. which was my personal requirement. Ultimately the hot key could be changed to any key, I just never needed to do a full hot key configuration. Some disclaimers: This has only been used by me, and it works for me. It has not been tested on Windows 8. It has not been tested with UAC enabled. I run everything from an Administrator account and have no problems, there really should not be any issues though from any other type of configuration though. Originally I had it compiled against .Net 4.0 but I just recompiled it under .NET 2.0 but everyone should have .NET 2.0 so it shouldn't be a problem. I re-uploaded it on Box, so it should be there forever. Also included a little information with it. hXXps://app.box.com/s/jg14q0r3s1139ds1qhe5