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Windows Vista users can use change your monitors timeout from with in command line. This would very useful if you quickly want to change your monitors timeout without accessing the control panel.

I use this feature particularly when using Skype, watching movies and when I am writing a post as I really get annoyed when the monitor goes blank. Let us now see how this can be done. There are two commands that we need to use depending upon the type of power that is used by the computer as it can be either powered in AC mode or in DC mode (battery).

The two commands are:

1. powercfg -Change -monitor-timeout-ac 60 (used when the computer is in AC mode)
2. powercfg -Change -monitor-timeout-dc 60 (used when the computer is in DC mode or using the battery for power)

The numeric value 60 here tells Windows Vista to timeout the monitor after 60 minutes, so you can put the value that suits your requirement. I have created batch file and use Launchy to launch the batch file quickly whenever the need arises. So you can also try that.

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