How to sleep the screen on Windows 10

If you leave your system unattended, your screen will eventually go to sleep. If you don’t return to it, the system will lock itself once the set amount of time has expired. If you want to turn the display off at will, you can set up the power button to do so. The power button may not be the most convenient way to go about it, especially if it’s hard to reach. Instead of a hard button, you can add a simple soft button and keyboard shortcut that will sleep the screen. Here’s how you can get it.

Sleep screen on Windows 10

In order to sleep the screen with a soft button or a keyboard shortcut, you have to install a free, open-source app called ScreenSleep. Download it from Github and run it.

The app runs in the system tray and adds a display/monitor icon to it. If you click it, a menu will open with an option to sleep the screen. Since this take two clicks, the quicker way to use the app is with its keyboard shortcut.

The default keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+M but, you can change it. Click the app’s icon in the system tray, and select Settings from the menu. The settings window only has one item that you can change i.e., the keyboard shortcut. Click inside the box where the shortcut is, and type the new one you want to use.

ScreenSleep can be set to run at startup from the app’s own built-in settings.

The app works great with a single monitor, and with multiple monitors. It can sleep both an external and an internal display without any problems. The sleep applies only to the displays. It has nothing to do with the Sleep option for Windows 10. It’s an entirely different feature.

The Windows 10 power options let you set when the display is put to sleep. You can change when the system puts the display to sleep and it works perfectly but it’s time bound. You have to wait for a certain time, even if it’s just a minute, to expire in order for the display to go to sleep. This app gives you a method to sleep it at will.

Since this is just putting the display to sleep, it’s not a security layer of any sort. The app isn’t too old and it appears to be under active development. Maybe it will eventually allow users to selectively sleep a display.