kepo-ing Zz85

Based on our experiences use gadgets like handphones, digital cameras, DS etc, we probably guessed bulked of the batteries usage went into the LCD screen.

Personally I find little electricity used in turning the colours of the pixels, but much in powering the backlight. A digital watch I had exceeded its estimated battery life without its light used often. The DS Lite new brightness levels consumes the battery much faster than if you use the less bright options. When I use the DS for music listening, closing the lid usually turns off the LCD and allow much longer battery stamina. Digital cameras usually have an option for switching on and off the LCD screens, but what about laptops?

Let me go through the different options.

High-end models would have the LCD poweroff button: Hit “Fn+Battery Key”. If you don’t, you could dim it manually hitting the brightness buttons.

Why not close the laptop lid? Remember the reason why we just want just the lights of is for the computer to go doing what it needs to (play some music, transferring files using wifi, do some virus scan etc). Closing the lid but default usually means suspend, sleep or hibernate, so you need to change the power saving schemes if you like the lid shutting action.

Windows have this Blank screensaver which turns the screen black. Or you could download the freeware Power Dimmer which mimics iBooks screen-fading-energy-saving feature. Take note that these 2 doesn’t turn your screen off, only changing the screen black so the lights in them are still on. Anyway a tip for those who like to turn on their screensavers by demand, create a shortcut (on the desktop) to the screensaver file, double click it or assign a hot shortcut key to run them.

Next, in the windows energy saving section, you could specify screens to turn off after a period of time. Good, and I usually set it @ 2 minutes and power dimmer @ 1 minute. However, your media player may forbid the system entering power saving while you are listening to music.

Here’s more cool tools to the field. NirCmd is a command line based swiss knife for windows. Type nircmd.exe monitor off or create a shortcut for this command to turn off your screen at demand.

Need a easier software? There’s a software called MonOff but I’ve not tired it. However, my favorite software for controlling windows shutdowns called PowerOff also does the job for screens. Its a very small, no-installations-needed file, and after running it you task it to poweroff your screen/windows immediately or a specific time, or decide later at the icon-tray.

Further readings: 1
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Lights off, sleep tight, keep dreaming, so don’t drain my battery, screen, eyesight and brain cycles too much.