Monitor Just Won’t Go To Sleep

The other day I noticed that the screen saver marque was floating across my two 24″ monitors. That may not sound much like a problem but it certainly was as I don’t think I had ever seen the marque since I set it up. Why, because I have relied on the Power Management Settings to power down my monitors before the screen saver would kick in. However, it was no longer happening. Step one, close everything down and reboot.
That didn’t solve the trick. I then tried resetting the times, 1 minute for power-down and 2 minutes for screen saver. What I got was the screen-saver. This eliminated “by reason” that a device was preventing it from going into sleep mode. Now, this may in fact be the case, but logic says try something else.
Next step, Google. Lots there, but not much of any help in solving the problem, but what I did discover was a very handy utility. Actually, I had come across it some time ago, but, it got lost in the cob webs. Anyway, the utility is a ‘definite’ must have for all techs. It is called nircmd.exe (get it here). One of the many tasks it can do is turn off your monitor. By using this tool I tested the command and in doing so my monitors went to sleep. Thus, there as not a problem with my monitors or the computer’s ability to control them.
The dilemma was now, spend unknown amount of time trying to figure out who or what is the culprit. Do a system restore and see if that fixes it and if so then reinstall any updates and hope it doesn’t repeat it self, or, simply make it work.
To accomplish this, I thought if I could simply run a batch file whenever the screen-saver kicked in (as I know that worked), then could run the nircmd command line and be good to go.
However, after Googling and going through 7 pages ‘not much help’ here, I found the answer. And a simple one at that. Using the built-in Windows scheduler.
I quickly found myself at a pass when creating the task, via the wizard, there was no option for idle time. This used to exist and I didn’t see why it would have been removed, so I simply selected “on startup” and then selected the Advanced setup button later in the wizard. Now, I simply set the idle time I wanted and I was back in biz. So, once again it was a 5 minute fix, it only took an hour to figure it out.