ickybot
4 discussion posts
I've downloaded v3.4.1 and have been playing around with it for the last couple hours. I'm very impressed and so long as I don't run into any disasters will surely purchase it soon.
What led me to this software was an interest in being able to power down individual screens for power saving purposes. Pressing buttons is getting annoying. Ideally the software would put individual monitors to sleep based on time and/or content. I was a bit sad to find that the software can't really do this, and after reading through some posts here understand it is a bit of a windows limitation.
One post gave the suggestion of creating multiple monitor configurations and using hot keys to switch. I've done this and it works well enough that I'll accept it as my solution for now. I have a couple comments to add to this strain of ideas:
1) I wish I had some more hot key flexibility for monitor configurations. If I have 4 monitors, I'd love to be able to press something like: ctrl+window+alt and then press down number keys for whichever monitors I want to turn on (maybe 1+2, or 1+3+4). I don't mind setting up 16 monitor configurations and 16 hot keys, but without the ability to press two digits at once the hot keys are going to get messy. Maybe this is easy to add?
1b) Is it possible to stop windows 7 from asking me "do you want to keep this monitor configuration", every time I change it?
2) One of my screens is a Philips 40PFL7505D (40" LED TV). When I bought it I was so pleased that it was smart enough to turn off the backlight when only displaying a black screen (and even with just a taskbar). This saves energy, but when windows turns the screens off, the tv loses signal and displays a big bright "lost signal" banner across the screen - indefinitely. I'm still playing around, but with some combinations of switching through my monitor profiles I can both disconnect the TV and not have it display "lost signal" (so backlighting is turned off). Anyone know anything about this, or power saving on lcd tv's in general? I'm sad to report that this tv still draws 35W with backlight off (my other monitors draw ~1W when sleeping).
3) Screen saver on selected monitors ONLY (other monitors still usable) would be nice. Individual timeouts would be nice.
4) I'm probably doing something dumb, but I can't get the screensaver to actually come on by itself after timeout. Also, windows now longer powers down my monitors as set in my power-saving scheme.
Thanks,
Chris
ickybot
4 discussion posts
1) Is this a limitation with how keyboards work or something? If you can sense multiple keys being pressed then the implementation would seem pretty easy. Another solution would be a keystroke that brings up a monitor profile selection screen (kind of like the windows alt+tab) and then I can quickly select the profile I want. I might have 20 profiles to pick from (4-6 screens for me) and if they were represented in thumbnail size I could just click on the one I want.
2) Kind of good news: I updated the firmware on my lcd tv and now it's smart enough to turn off after not having signal for a while.