DigitallyCreated
Programs

Sleep Display

Sleep Display is a small Windows application I wrote that simply puts your monitors into their sleep mode either immediately or after a certain amount of time.

I found that I needed Sleep Display because when I leave my computer on at night, my monitors light up my room and make it difficult to sleep. The only way to make them sleep immediately was to change the Windows power settings so that they went to sleep after one minute of idle time; obviously not a good solution. After hunting around on the net quickly and not finding any free utilities to simply sleep the screens, I decided to write my own.

Sleep Display is written in C# for .NET 2.0. It is, however, not operating system independent because it makes a call to the native Windows Win32 API in order to command the screens to sleep.

Download

Latest Version: v1.1.2
Last Updated: 2008/11/23
Platform: Windows
Requirements: Microsoft .NET Framework (2.0 or later)
Size: 342KB
Download: MSI

How to Use

The UI for Sleep Display is the easiest to way to use Sleep Display. Simply start Sleep Display from the Start Menu to open the UI. You can then select the time after which you want Sleep Display to put your monitors into sleep mode. You are able to specify a time in seconds, minutes or hours. Once the countdown has begun, you are able to cancel it at any time. When the time is up, your displays will go to sleep and Sleep Display will automatically exit.

Note there is also a start menu shortcut (Sleep Display Now) that will sleep your monitors immediately, showing no UI.

An alternate way to use Sleep Display is by providing it command line arguments. There is only one argument: 

Usage: SleepDisplay.exe -Time <NumSeconds>

By using the -Time argument you can specify the number of seconds that Sleep Display will wait before it sleeps your display. No UI will be displayed at all once the countdown has begun and therefore there is no way to stop it (short of killing the process).

The Sleep Display Now start menu shortcut uses the command line argument to work. It does this: 

SleepDisplay.exe -Time 0

Version History

v1.1.2

  • Fixed keyboard usage. The first control selected is the numeric spinner, and the Enter key presses the Go button. Once Go is pressed, the Cancel button is selected so the Enter key cancels.
  • Fixed the bug where, if you closed the program during the sleep countdown, its process would remain open until the countdown expired but without a window. Closing the window now cancels the countdown.

v1.1.1

  • First public version