MonitorES (formerly Monitor Energy Saver)

MonitorES is a small software application developed specifically for helping you save energy by automatically turning off your monitor each time you lock the workstation. It can be deployed on all Windows versions out there.

This is a portable tool. You can store it on USB flash drives or other portable devices to have it with you all the time. You may run it without administrative privileges.

Gaining access to its features requires only opening the executable file because there’s no setup included in the process. It does not write entries to your Windows registry and leave other configuration files on the target PC. It actually saves the settings data on the storage device. Getting rid of it implies a simple deletion task of the files that you have downloaded from the Internet.

You can find MonitorES sitting quietly in the system tray without disturbing your activity with popup notifications. Accessing the application’s configuration panel can be done by double-clicking on its icon from the system tray.

The configuration window looks intuitive. It gathers all setup parameters in a single window. A help manual is not included in the package but you can tweak the dedicated options on your own because they look easy to work with.

MonitorES offers you the possibility to automatically turn off the monitor or activate the screensaver when you lock the workstation.

You can make the utility set an automatic ‘Away’ messenger status for your Yahoo! account (you need to provide information about your Yahoo! user ID) and manually specify the message. Your status can be restored to its normal state when you unlock the PC.

Other notable configuration settings worth being mentioned enable you to automatically pause your media programs (like Winamp), automatically mute the volume, start the tool at Windows startup, as well as disable the screensaver. Last but not least, it comes with support for a preset hotkey (‘CTRL + F2’) which can be used for turning off the display on the go.

Tests have shown that MonitorES carries out a task quickly and without errors. It does not eat up a lot of CPU and memory resources so the overall performance of the PC is not affected.

To sum things up, MonitorES provides support for several handy features for helping you automatically turn off the monitor, pause all your media programs, and set the ‘Away’ status message to your IM account upon locking the PC. The straightforward design makes it suitable for less experienced users and professionals alike.