How To Turn Off Your Monitor Via HotKeys

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If your computer stays on the entire day then turning off your monitor when you’re not at your desk can save you a noticeable amount on the electricity bill. But you don’t want to push that button each time you’re leaving or coming back to your system. With the latest monitors, those buttons are getting more sensitive so the less you push them the better. And you certainly can’t keep on accessing your monitor’s preferences in your computer and put it to sleep from there; that would just be consuming too much time.

What you need is Monitor Off Utility (MOU).  MOU is a great freeware utility from Dekisoft, creators of Sensible Note Taker and Sensible File Renamer. With MOU, you can turn off your monitor via hotkeys.  The download file is merely 350KB large and you can have the program up and running in no time. Here’s how the main window and system tray icon for MOU look like:

As you can see from the image of the main window, MOU offers impressive functionality. You can assign hotkeys to the tasks of shutting off your monitor or turning on the screensaver. You can even setup a delay between pressing your hotkeys and the monitor turning off. You can particularly use this delay when you absolutely have to leave your system but do not want the monitor to turn off (not that an off monitor would disturb the ongoing programs) before a particular file downloads; you can specify how later, in seconds, the monitor will turn off. To turn your monitor back on, just move your mouse or press any key on the keyboard.

If you check the ‘Lock Workstation’ checkbox, your computer will be locked before the monitor is turned off. By ‘locked’ we mean it will require your Windows username password before it lets you back to your workspace after you turn the monitor back on.

Other options include closing the application to the system tray icon, checking for updates automatically, automatically starting up with Windows, and turning off your monitor (or monitors, in case you have more than one installed) at startup.

A neat free application, MOU should be used by all computer users to save unnecessary waste of electricity.

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