GoDark - Windows Utility to Turn Off Laptop Displays Easily
■ Purpose
■ Alternatives
■ Birth
■ Download
Every laptop users face this problem: super fast draining of battery. Do you know which part of your laptop uses more energy in normal situations ? It is your display. It takes lot of power to light up millions of pixels in the screen. Smartphone users will understand this concept better because it is shown in the battery usage graph. So I made a teeny tiny tool called "GoDark". It is a simple application for Windows Laptop users to turn off the display when it is not needed.
Purpose
You can save a lot of battery power if you could turn off the display when you are not in need of it. For example when you are downloading something, listening to music, converting some files etc. During these things you can turn off the display. But there are only a few brands who provides a hardware key to turn off the laptop display. With windows power options you can adjust some settings to make laptop not to sleep when the lid is closed. But you have to do this every time after you switch back. So that is difficult. And another problem I found with that option is, if you close the lid with your laptop running then in few minutes the display will heat up because of placing it near to laptop body. This can cause damage to display.
Alternatives
You can also set the display time out time to the lowest. But it will turn off display when you are watching video from Youtube of Facebook. Another trick is to switch the projector option to Second Screen Only mode. But the problem is, it is not reliable at all. I suggest not to try it. Because it sometimes get stuck at an option and the display never turns on back again. It happened to me once and I had to force restart my laptop. I lost everything I typed because I just forgot to save the file because of the spontaneous flow of data from my brain to my fingers. Okay. That's why I made this app.
Birth
I made it when I was studying in my college GCE Kannur. One or two of my friends had used it. I'm sharing it here. I think it will help some of you. GoDark is basically a small application made in Visual Studio. I used VB.NET. Why Visual Basic ? Many people ask me that question. They say it is a language for newbies. I should be using C# blah blah. If you have same question in your mind then listen: First, Visual Basic is the language I used first and it is my favorite. Second, I hate curly braces ! Third, I want my code to be a documentation of itself so that when I return to it after a couple of days, in which I might have gone through hundreds of another researches, I can catch up what I have already done so far.
Download
Coming back to topic. You can download the exe file from link below. You can either place it in desktop. Just double click it to turn off display. There is no UI at all. That's why I don't have a screenshot here. Or you can drag and drop the file to task bar. So you can just tap it whenever you need. So try it and let me know the feedback. If you have any suggestions tell me. I will try to include them in next version. Happy saving battery !