Shortcut to turning off 1 monitor in dual set up

Suburban Atlas

New member
This may be a bit confusing, so I'll try and explain it as good as possible.

I have a dual monitor set up, but when I play games like Crysis, it's nice to not be sending data to the second monitor and eating up my video card resources. So what I usually do is right click, go to the Nvidia control panel, and turn off the secondary monitor.

I'm curious if there's a way I can make a command or shortcut to click or bind keys to, that will turn the second monitor off and on when I'm playing.

I know programs exist that you can create a shortcut to (and bind keys to) that will turn off your monitors, but I need one that will only shut off the secondary, and not the primary monitor.

Is this fairly easy (I'm fairly adept with basic programming), or would it require some serious programming skills and creating my own programs?
 

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Hello Suburban Atlas,

Would just turning off/on the monitor by using the monitors power button itself work for this? If there's no power to the monitor, the graphics will not send anything to it.
 

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I have written a simple .bat file that should toggle your second monitor for you.
This is what is in it:

@echo off
title ScreenOff
cls
for /f %%A in (SreenOff.Dat) do set power=%%A
echo %power%
if "%power%"=="ECHO is on." (
set power=on
)else (
if "%power%"=="nope" (
echo Switching ON
DisplaySwitch.exe /extend
set power=on
)else (
echo Switching OFF
DisplaySwitch.exe /internal
set power=nope
)
)
(echo %power%)> SreenOff.Dat

I have also attached the file, and by the way you can set a key shortcut to the executable in its properties.
 

Attachments

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I have written a simple .bat file that should toggle your second monitor for you.
This is what is in it:

@echo off
title ScreenOff
cls
for /f %%A in (SreenOff.Dat) do set power=%%A
echo %power%
if "%power%"=="ECHO is on." (
set power=on
)else (
if "%power%"=="nope" (
echo Switching ON
DisplaySwitch.exe /extend
set power=on
)else (
echo Switching OFF
DisplaySwitch.exe /internal
set power=nope
)
)
(echo %power%)> SreenOff.Dat

I have also attached the file, and by the way you can set a key shortcut to the executable in its properties.

Hey

I was just looking for very similar thing !

And... gently stealing the topic...

The script above turn off all screens but 1. I have 4 screens. Out of which I want to turn off 1. Is there a way to specify ID of screen that I want to turn off?

The second thing that I noticed ist hat when it turns off screen it changes the setup to 3 screens - meaning it refreshes all UI and sets the windows to be 3 screen setup not 4. Can I somehow preserve the 4 screen setup but just disable 1 screen? Or set it black/off not sure?

I'm mostly working on 3 screens and the 4th one only once a while. I cant disable it with power button because then windows goes to 3 screens and all my color calibration profiles gets messed up :- (
 

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Scrren off

Hello,

Your Bat file is working great. But I want to do the opposite of what it does i.e Turn off my pricipal screen and leave on the extend one on. would you please give the text of the bat file with these changes, Thank you very Much
 

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windows 7 family
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