How to temporarily turn off the laptop screen without turning off the device

 

One of the things in which a laptop differs from a desktop computer is that the latter contains within its components a separate display screen with buttons dedicated to controlling display settings in addition to a button responsible for turning them on and off, which is essential when you leave the office temporarily. This ability is missing in laptops, as it comes with a built-in screen that does not contain dedicated control buttons or even a single button whose function is to turn off the screen, forcing the user who needs to temporarily leave the system in sleep mode or fold the screen.

 

However, let us review with you the following some easy ways that help you to turn off the laptop screen temporarily without having to shut down the device. This will save a lot of battery power since the screen is the most power-consuming among all the laptop components.

 

1st method: convert the power button to the screen off button

 

By default, pressing the power button while the laptop is on shuts down the device and, on other devices, may activate Sleep Mode. But you can change this procedure so that when you press the power button, it turns off the laptop screen instead of shutting down the device or entering sleep mode. This method can be applied easily and is effective on most laptops.

 

All you have to do is right-click on the miniature battery icon from the taskbar at the bottom (next to the clock), then from the menu that will appear, click on “Power Options” to open the power settings control window, and on the left side you will find an option called “Choose what the power buttons" and press it. After that, you will click on the drop-down menu in front of the When I press the power button section, and choose in both (On battery and Plugged in) the "Turn off the display" option, as shown in the image above.

 

When finished, click the Save changes button to save the new settings. From now on, whenever you want to turn off the laptop screen, press the power button once, and the screen will turn off immediately. To turn it back on again, press the power button, move the mouse cursor, or press any key on the keyboard.

 

2nd Method: Shorten the screen auto-off timeout

 

The Windows system automatically turns off the laptop screen when there is no activity on the device for 5 minutes if the charger is not connected, and for 15 minutes if the charger is connected. Thus, if you are looking to use another method instead of reusing the power button (method 1), you can shorten this period so that you do not need to manually turn off the screen. To do this, open the Settings application from the Start menu or by pressing the Win + I keys together, then go to the "System" section and from the side menu click on "Power & Sleep". Now, in the “Screen” part, select the shortest available period from the “On battery power” and “When plugged in” lists, noting that the shortest period is one minute. If you stop moving the mouse cursor or pressing any key on the keyboard for a minute, it will turn off. screen immediately.

 

3th Method: Using the Display Power Off tool

 

In the event that the previous method did not succeed in achieving the desired, and you also do not want to tamper with the power settings in the Windows system, then there is nothing left but to use an external tool to help you turn off the laptop screen temporarily. Let me tell you that there are many tools designed specifically for this job, but if you are looking for a quick, easy, and simple tool, I suggest you use Display PowerOff Utility, as it is a very small tool that works on laptop screens as well as desktop computer screens. The idea of the tool is to provide a simple shortcut to turn off the screen when needed to reduce power consumption. All you have to do after downloading the tool is to decompress the main folder to extract the operating files.

 

When you need to turn off the screen temporarily, double-click the first doff.exe file, while the second file with the same name activates the screensaver immediately. But to improve the handling of the tool, you can place it on the taskbar for easy access, so double-click on the doff-tray file and a miniature icon will appear on the taskbar (next to the clock). Now, whenever you want to turn off the laptop screen, all you have to do is right-click on that icon and choose "Turn Off Display".