• Help me find my lost utility

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    #490001

    For years, I’ve had a utility running that would let me start the screen saver with a hotkey combination and blank the screen with another hotkey combo. Something happened and that utility is no longer running and I can’t recall what the name of it was. I’ve searched through all my various installers (I keep all of them whether I’m using the programs or not) and can’t find anything like this. Also, none of my other utilities have any such option.

    This is on Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit but it may even go back to XP.

    This was quite handy for me as I use all my photos for my screen saver and it was a quick way to start the slide show screen saver or to quickly blank the screen.

    Does anyone recognize this?

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    • #1400250

      This was quite handy for me as I use all my photos for my screen saver and it was a quick way to start the slide show screen saver or to quickly blank the screen.

      Does anyone recognize this?

      nreiter,

      Hello… If you go to “Control Panel”>Category>Change Desktop Background….Then Browse to the folder that you want, and select the Pic’s that you want ( Check Box) for your “SlideShow”…:cheers: Regards Fred

      PS: As far as the “Hot Key” See This And This

    • #1400252

      I don’t want to set a slide show for the desktop background, I use John’s Background Switcher for that. I’m referring to the screen saver slide show. I know how to set up a Boss key, but that requires a shortcut and the utility I had was simpler. Just tell it the hotkey and it did the rest.

      I’m looking for a utility to set a hotkey to start the screen saver immediately. When it was working, I could press Ctl-Alt-S and the slide show would start up with no delay. Ctl-Alt-B would blank the screen after a 5 second delay. I think the delay was programmable.

      Thanks for trying 🙂

      • #1400570

        Hi Ned,
        Below is the URL of a webpage that describes various applications that enable the user to create shortcut keys. I have not used any of them, but they seem to bear at least superficial resemblance to something that might be similar to what I understood you have used in the past. I do hope that I qualified that sufficiently. 😀

        http://softwaresolution.informer.com/Assign-Key-Shortcuts/

        Hope this helps,
        Dave

    • #1400574

      Dave,

      Thanks for that reference. I’ll look them over and see if I can find what I’m looking for.

    • #1400598

      Well, none of those utilities would do what I wanted, but then I remembered Steve Gibson’s wizmo program. I did have to create 2 shortcuts with hotkeys to call wizmo with the commands to either turn off the monitor or to start the screen blanker. I put the shortcuts in a folder on the desktop where I keep a bunch of other seldom used shortcuts so they don’t take up any additional desktop space.

      Problem solved.

    • #1402933

      As a follow up to my Wizmo solution. I had put the shortcuts in a folder on my desktop and found that they didn’t persist across a reboot. I could reestablish the keyboard shortcuts and they would work until the next reboot. A little research at MS turned up the tidbit that keyboard shortcuts to program shortcuts only work on the desktop itself, not in desktop folders. Moving the Wizmo shortcuts to the desktop fixed the persistence problem at the expense of 2 additional icons on the desktop. I still haven’t found the original utility I was looking for.

    • #1404847

      I found it! A program called Monitor Off Utility from Dekisoft.

    • #1405582

      Hi Ned,
      I would imagine that finding the utility at last was richly satisfying. Congratulations!

      Dave

    • #1405621

      Yes, it was. And it was hiding on my system the whole time!

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