TurnOffScreen

Sure enough technology has come a long way in a really short while, but there was a time when screensavers helped prolong the lifespan of  monitors. Nowadays it’s simply better to turn it off and save some power. In this regard, TurnOffScreen comes as a straightforward, lightweight tool to solve this task at the press of a button.

The application comes in a pretty light package and saves you the effort of pressing a few “next” buttons to get it deployed on your computer. It can run just as well from a thumb drive so you can carry it around in case you’re working on multiple computers. You just need to make sure that the target  PC is fitted with .NET Framework.

It minimizes to the tray area on launch with no tooltips or notifications to let you know it’s there. There’s isn’t even a window to work with, not that this has any effect on overall practicality, given its straightforward approach on the situation.

Designed to do exactly one thing, there are no tweaking options or possibility to configure how this is done. Interacting with the tray icon turns the  screen off. There is a dedicated option which makes it require a double-click operation so you don’t turn off the  screen by accident. It would have been useful to also assign a hotkey for more comfort.

The screen isn’t turned off directly when the application is launched, but only when you interact with it. Just to have it ready by the time you reach the desktop, there’s the possibility to manually add a shortcut to the system Startup folder so this way it starts with Windows.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that TurnOffScreen does exactly what the name suggests with little effort on your behalf. Customization options are missing entirely, but even so, it provides a quick way of turning off the  screen which you can also carry around on a thumb drive.