Put one monitor of a dual monitor windows system into standby
- by Psycogeek
Standby not Disabled!
When running 2 monitors on windows 7 or Windows XP, I would like to be able to put one of the monitors at a time into standby. The method can be manual.
When running 2 monitors , the second monitor is not always needed, shutting off the monitors own power switch will turn off the monitor, that does work Ok. Problems with that are , the delay with the monitor logo at turn on, and the power switch is not very accessable, and the switch might not live forever turning it on and off so many times.
Using disable methods like devcon, WIN-P and Display, causes all the windows to properly move to the other monitor. While that is what a person would want to happen so they can get hold of the windows, that is not what I want to happen, and some things on the other monitor have to be re-arranged after a re-enable. By putting it into standby mode, nothing changes other than the monitor going into standby.
Disconnecting the DVI cable still can cause the system to (properly) shift all the windows over to the one monitor, just like any of the disable methods do. That makes a mess of the windows, and is so unacceptable, that I would prefer to leave the monitor on, wasting power and the hardware, when it could easily go into standby for some time.
For both monitors I am using a "MonitorOff" program that puts both monitors into standby, but I can not find a utility that will put only ONE monitor into standby for the windows system.
If someone comes along and suggests "ultramon" you must know for a fact that it will put One of either of the monitors into actual standby. And it does not really suit me to use ultramon, I tested it (it was nice) and I did not feel that it was a program I wanted.
The 2 monitors are running off of an ATI 4890 card, they are both hooked up DVI-I, the OS is both Windows 7 (primary) and Windows XP.
In addition it would also be interesting to have seperate standby activity timers, and follow mouse kind of standby changes, but any manuel method , shortcut, batch , tray, or gadget kind of operation would be a good start.
