Can I turn the monitor off & still have live VIOP & streaming audio?

[napi21]

I replaced my home phone with Magic Jack which has to have active broadband to work, and I play the streaming radio all night. Is there a way to turn the monitor display off and still have those two connections work?

[EvolveOrConvolve]

1. You can hit the power button on the monitor

When it's off, the computer is still operating. Just make sure that you don't have the computer set to go into sleep mode.

[Tab]

2. Yes, but how you do it depends...

If it's a desktop machine with separate monitor, just turn off the monitor power. Heck, once the desktop is booted you don't even need the monitor - you can remove it (technically you don't need it to boot either, but you probably have to log in or something).

If you have a laptop, then there's no "monitor power button". You'll have to go into the control panel and change the power settings to disable the monitor after a certain amount of time. An alternate method would be to set a screen saver that is just pure black. Another would be to change the output (this depends on your laptop, which may or may not have this feature). Some laptops can redirect monitor output to a VGA port - good for office presentations, say - usually done with a function key combination. On mine it's FN (Function) F8, except mine's smart enough to tell there's no external monitor connected, so maybe you need a medium-smart laptop - smart enough to redirect, but not so smart it can tell if you have an external monitor plugged in or not.