How can I make my screen blank by a shortcut?

I'd like a shortcut that makes the screen go to a black screen immediately, without turning any power off, or even putting it to sleep.

What ways can I do that?

How more efficient the solution is to set up, the better.

You can just make a shortcut to the blank screensaver and then set a keyboard shortcut via the properties window for the shortcut.

The screensaver is called scrnsave.scr, located in %SYSTEMROOT%\system32.

You can easily do this with NirCmd, these four options will give you a black screen each (with side effect):

• Turn off the monitor.

  nircmd.exe monitor off
  

• Start the default screen saver (set it to a blank one, so you can make the screen blank).

  nircmd.exe screensaver
  

• Put your computer in 'standby' mode.

  nircmd.exe standby
  

• Turn off your computer.

  nircmd.exe exitwin poweroff
  

Make sure that you have nircmd.exe in C:\Windows\System32 if you want to call it from anywhere.

As Dennis Williamson pointed out in his comment, you can create a hotkey like this:

nircmd.exe cmdshortcutkey "C:\Windows\Temp" "MO" "Ctrl+Shift+M" monitor off

Or a shortcut on your desktop which you can click like this:

nircmd.exe cmdshortcut "~$folder.desktop$" "Turn Monitor off" monitor off

With AutoHotkey, you can bind any of the above commands to a hotkey:

#s::Run nircmd.exe monitor off

The above hotkey WIN+S would for example turn the monitor off.

An alternative program, if you dislike scripting, could be PhaseExpress.

Set your screensaver to the one called "blank". Press Win-L.

Here are some examples of using AutoHotkey to turn off the monitor or start the screen saver without needing NirCmd.

I used NirCmd to create a task in Win7 task scheduler, that turns the monitor off when I lock the computer (Ctrl+L)

In the Actions, paste: nircmd.exe and in Arguments put monitor off.

Then use the drop-down in Triggers to choose "Workstation is locked". Works like a charm.

There is a built-in function on my laptop. Just hit the Fn+F6. This toggles the black screen on my laptop, anyway: no extra command programming required.