I have a question that does not seem to have been addressed in these (or other) forums.

My goal is to have a laptop and projector display, at pre-defined times, a slide show in a closed store. The store will be empty, so manual intervention is not possible. The schedule will be (something like) 5pm to 9pm every night, plus 11am to 1pm Saturday and Sundays.

I have a projector that can sense a signal input. If the signal is there it will wake up and project. If not, it will drop into standby mode and save bulb use. So the challenge is to get a monitor signal to turn on and off according to a predetermined schedule.

I have a Dell Lattitude D600 laptop that I am willing to devote to this cause if someone can explain to me how I can get it to magically turn the monitor on and off according to a schedule. I'm also open to other ideas if a laptop is not the best slide show generator!

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make this work?

Thanks in advance for your support!

Hello Goodland,

Windows doesn't have this facility by default (only to turn the monitor off after a maximum of 5 hours of inactivity), but there are a number of other ways of doing it using 3rd party apps.

One way is this.

- Download this useful utility: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.zip
- Extract it to a folder you will remember, say c:\nircmd
- Open up your task scheduler (Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools), and add a new task.
- Take yourself through scheduling your task, selecting c:\nircmd\nircmd.exe as your application, and when you would like this task to start (5pm). Call this one "Monitor ON".
- At the end of the wizard, check the "open advanced properties..." check box and Finish.
- Under the Task tab, change the contents of run to: c:\nircmd\nircmd.exe monitor on and then press OK to finish.

^ Follow the same process above, except this time call the task "Monitor OFF" using the command c:\nircmd\nircmd.exe monitor off

You can test the monitor off task by right clicking on it, followed by Run.

You should have a password on the laptops account if you want to use the task scheduler. If you don't want to set a password on that account, have a look at a thread I answered a short time ago regarding using blank passwords: http://www.pchelpforum.com/windows-v...end-email.html

I wrote that procedure down in a bit of a rush, so if you have any problems, please let me know.

Thanks MM, I have set up the laptop to run a simulation overnight, and it so far it is working pretty well. The only drawback to the this setup is that Windows seems to like finding excuses to turn the monitor back on. I'm trying to eliminate possible messages or other activities that might cause an interrupt. Ultimately a persistent 'Monitor OFF' reschedule may be enough to cover the issues. Thanks again for your quick and effective suggestion! Cheers!

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