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Put the screen to sleep only?

B

bumfilter

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 16, 2004
221
0
Hello all,

I'm using a 20 inch iMac (iSight) and at night, I leave it to encode my DVD's.

I was wondering, is there someway to put the screen only to sleep and not the full machine? It is possible via the Energy Saving preferences but I don't want the screen to sleep all the time, just at night when I want it to.

Is there a keyboard shortcut or something similar that could to this?

Thanks if you can help.
 
go to system preferences > energy saver > and make sure the checkmark is not set to "put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" and move the upper slider to "never" sleep computer. leave the bottom slider set to your desired time to sleep the display.

like this:
 

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That puts the whole computer to sleep. He wants to put his display to sleep. At one point i had an applescript that would do this. Look over at osxhints.com
 
dylan said:
That puts the whole computer to sleep. He wants to put his display to sleep. At one point i had an applescript that would do this. Look over at osxhints.com
Click to expand...

odd, i do this all the time, even with active running things in terminal - no interruption. it seems to take it as a command to just sleep the display as per the set preferences. i could be wrong but this is how i understood it.
 
Thanks for all the comments.

I'm trying to get the screen to switch off really, rather than the whole computer going to sleep, when it sleeps, no tasks are carried out. I need the computer to be on, just not the screen.

On PowerBook I would simply reduce the brightness until the backlight turned off but on the iMac the brightness goes down to a certain level and not to totally off.
 
That's one of the things I hate about Apple hardware. There's currently a bug in Compressor/Batch Monitor where the screen won't sleep when it's processing. I have to physically pull out the ADC connector from the back of the PM G5 to turn off the Cinema Display. For an iMac, I have no idea what you could do.

You won't have to do such a drastic action. In your case, a workaround would be to keep Energy Saver in Preferences open, and when you want to sleep the display, just set the slider for display sleep to 1 min. Are you having the same issues as me?

Normally, I just leave it at 10 minutes and the LCD will sleep naturally. You won't extend LCD life by sleeping it right away in the normal course of the computer's life.

Here's to the Crazy Ones ​
 
grapes911 said:
On my PowerBook, I can put the screen to sleep after a certain amount of time. Isn't this possible on the iMac (or any other Mac)? Just set it to one minute.
Click to expand...
The OP did mention "I'm using a 20 inch iMac (iSight) and at night, I leave it to encode my DVD's." so I take it the iMac is unable to turn off properly. In that case, it's a known issue with Batch Monitor, so out of luck if that's the case.

Here's to the Crazy Ones ​
 
I don't think it has any problems, basically what I'm trying to achieve is switching the monitor off, either via a command or keyboard shortcut, instead of changing the timer in Energy Preferences every night.
 
Am a bit confused.... I do this with mine and the only setting I've altered is the "put hard disk to sleep" thing. That way the display sleeps after a period of inactivity but the Mac itself keeps doing whatever I've left it to complete - downloading or burning usually.
 
bumfilter said:
Hello all,

I'm using a 20 inch iMac (iSight) and at night, I leave it to encode my DVD's.

I was wondering, is there someway to put the screen only to sleep and not the full machine? It is possible via the Energy Saving preferences but I don't want the screen to sleep all the time, just at night when I want it to.

Is there a keyboard shortcut or something similar that could to this?

Thanks if you can help.
Click to expand...

I think what your looking for is shift+option+the media eject key. this should get just the display to go to sleep.
 
wow this thread is old but this is one way to do it...
 

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What about creating a hot corner to put the display to sleep? This is what I do on a MBP'09 so not sure if its the same on an iMac.
 
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