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David in Fairbanks, Alaska listens on Newsradio 970 KFBX and asked: " I live in Fairbanks, where it's either too light or too dark. I recently switched from a laptop computer to a desktop computer in my office. With the laptop, I could keep it dark in the room by just lowering the screen. But with the desktop computer, with the big monitor, I need to know if there's a way to keep listening to your program via podcast and have the screen dark. That's the dilemma."

David, that really depends on your monitor, but there should be at least one of several easy ways to listen to the podcast without the screen bothering you.

The first and most obvious answer is just turn off your monitor. It doesn’t need to be on for your computer to run so, assuming it’s an external screen, you can just turn it off and it won’t affect anything.

The second option is that you have an all-in-one type of desktop computer and the screen can not be turned off independently. If that’s the case you have two options: the more passive one is to take advantage for your computer’s energy saving settings and set your screen to turn off after a couple of minutes of inactivity.

If you want an instant solution close to closing your laptop’s lid, you can just turn down your brightness as low as it will go. If you have an all-in-one machine, the option to do that may come from a hot key or key press combination rather than a button on the screen itself.

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