Dealing with DisplayPort / HDMI autodetect

DisplayPorts autodetect your monitor's presense which is supposed to help reduce power but has the complete opposite effect. It does not save energy because when you turn off a monitor that is connected via a DisplayPort, Windows re-arranges your desktop and icons so you cannot just turn the monitor of when you go out of the office and expect everything to be the same. Your desktop does not re-arrange itself if your monitor goes to sleep the natural way. It is by design that when you turn a monitor off connected by a DisplayPort that Windows re-configures your desktop.

There are a couple of solution out there:

1. Get an adapter that sits in-between your monitor and DisplayPort on your PC that trick your computer in to thinking the monitor is still present. This solution will work but is a bit expensive.
2. Use HDMI connection instead. This is tolerant to you turning your monitor of because the extra feature that is in the DisplayPort spec is not in that of HDMI. Using you DVI socket will also have the same effect.
3. I have NOT tried a DisplayPort to DVI/HDMI converter to see if that fixes the issue, but it might

Un-Tested Solutions

1. On some ATI cards there is a registry setting that might work
2. For nvidia card some people have noted a work around but is untested.
3. Apparently in Vista you could disable TMM to do this