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MonitorES Updates, Pauses Any Media Player When You Lock Your PC

Windows only: Tiny, portable utility MonitorES not only turns off the monitor when you lock your PC, it also pauses almost any media player and even sets your Google and Yahoo IM status to away.

We’ve written about this utility before, but since then it has updated with support for nearly any media player, added support for Yahoo Messenger, and you can now use it to simply pause your media with the Pause key. As before, you simply need to launch the utility, set the options, and the next time you lock your workstation your monitor will turn off, and your media will pause.

MonitorES is free and open source, available for Windows only. If you simply want to shut the monitor off without anything running in the background, I’ve written an article about how to shut off the monitor and alternately lock your PC with a shortcut, or you can use previously mentioned PushMonitOff to turn off the monitor.

MonitorES [Google Code]

Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)

  • Nabeel

    At first I used to chuckle away when people commented that LH can read their minds, but I just experienced it myself.
    I swear it was just yesterday that I got up and locked my PC that I realized I should make a script to pause itunes...though I never went around to doing it...here comes LH to the rescue!

    /believes in miracles.

  • TunaFish

    Foobar has keyboard shortcuts for pausing my mp3 playing, but I like the IM 'away' option here...I'll check it out.

  • pirate_panda

    This sounds like a really convenient program if you have to suddenly leave your computer. Too bad I use command-line MPlayer and Pidgin, neither of which is supported.

    Guess I'll just spend the extra 5 seconds each time I lock. *sigh*

  • GldRush98

    Minimize on autostart! Yay! That was probably my biggest problem with this program. Awesome.

    GldRush98

  • paintbox

    This looks neat but nothing could induce me to reenable win+L I hit that key too many times by mistake. I had to take it out back, with a registry hack.

    paintbox

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