is there a command to turn off the display on a laptop/notebook to save energy without sending the notebook into standby. i want it to continue working, but want to shut the display down to save energy.

Assuming your are lacking a built in function that is proprietary to your particular system I would go to Control Panel > Power Options and make sure Hibernate is OFF and then select or create a Power Scheme that only turns off the monitor.

actually i do have such a sheme (turns display off after a minute) and a normal laptop sheme that also shuts hard disks down and so on, but i was thinking of some kind of shortcut, that i can manually use or not use.

Do a search on www.tweakxp.com I bet there is something in there for that.

The power options in windows let you do this.

Under Power Options->Advanced, put a check mark beside "Always show icon on the taskbar".

Then go back to the power schemes tab and select "Max Battery" from the pull down menu. Change the settings to your liking (display turn off after 1 min), and then click on Save As. Select a name for it (Call it MOO for now).

When you want to select this behaviour (display off after 1 min), single-click on the battery/power cord icon in the system tray, and select MOO from the menu.

Starting the power scheme with Max Battery will also set your computer to use the lowest possible processor speed, which will also help improve battery life.

Hope this helps.

personally i would just select the option of "Do Nothing When I close the lid of my computer" as that wont place it standby or hibernate, but will turn off the lcd

i have no button to turn off the lcd!

ok, i think i got it. turning standby off and closing the display switches it off. pressing the sleep key sends the laptop into standby. unplugging the usb-mouse resumes it from standby

turning standby off and closing the display switches it off

what do you mean, the unit just turns off when you set the property in power mngmnt to "do nothing"..??

that's interesting..do you have another program controling power settings...ie if it was an IBM - MaxiMizer Wizard, Dell - Quickset, Toshiba - PowerSave or something like that...