Keith,

Greetings from the land of sunshine and expensive electricity! I'm writing to lobby for your engineers attention in an area that could make DF orders of magnitude more valuable to me and anyone else who cares about the cost of running big multi-monitor systems.

Please take a second to consider this: EVERYTHING DF does is way cool in terms of making my life easier, but it doesn't directly save me money. Now consider that for a 13-panel desktop like mine, "dimming" all 13 monitors results directly in about a 450W instant power consumption drop. For a system that runs 24/7 but is often unattended, in a place where electricity costs $.30/kwh, that 450W works out to more than $100/mo in electricity savings.

I can't use Windows built-in monitor dimming feature for several reasons:

• I need to be able to specify WHICH monitors to dim, on a per-monitor basis, because there is just ONE monitor I need to keep live at all times so passers-by can monitor the status of the system
• When Windows dims all my monitors, when it un-dims (wakes up), Windows sometimes gets confused about how many monitors are connected and a "window collapse" occurs where Windows moves app windows off of a monitor it doesn't yet see has reconnected. Per-monitor dimming policy would work around this.

I envision a new tab on the properties page for allowing DF to manage monitor power savings mode. The most obvious upgrade from Windows default behavior is to allow the dimming policy to be set on a per-monitor basis. But I can think of plenty of other opportunities to improve on Windows default behavior... For instance you could allow new triggers other than just mouse/keyboard activity to wake the system up from dim mode, and hooks to allow user scripts to dim or wake up either individual monitors or the entire system.

Please consider the above suggestion. While I'm here, any update on the long-standing wishlist for creating groups of related monitors across which a screensaver photo can be stretched?

Thanks,
Erik

Keith,

It was I who suggested the feature you describe to lock windows in place, so YES, I am totally psyched to learn you are looking at it seriously. Bring it on!!! Nothing would be better than to be able to just turn monitors' power switches on and off when I want to look at them, and have the system not notice the difference.

If we are going this route (rather than DF managing dimming), here are a few more thoughts for your engineers to consider:

In my experience, when Windows decides a monitor is gone and tries to move all the windows off it, the biggest problem is not moving the windows back, but coping with the consequential effects. For example, if you have VMWare Workstation running in fullscreen mode on some of your monitors and a window collapse happens, you will almost always be forced to reboot the VM. The reason is that VMware reacts to Windows collapsing.

So YES, the solution you propose, IF flawlessly implemented, would solve my problem., I respectfully observe that the flawless implementation part is going to be challenging. Windows "desire" to make a mess of your desktop when it believes a monitor has been disconnected is pretty deeply ingrained into the design of windows, so my hat is off to anyone who can tame it!

All the best,
Erik

It sounds like the freeze the window even if the monitor gets turned off feature is something you are actually working on, not just considering for some day. 1) Please confirm that's true? 2) Do you have any ETA or guess when it will be done?

Thanks!
Erik