How to turn off Surface Pro monitor only WITHOUT it sleeping?

This blanking of the screen without sleeping is easily done by simply setting the power options to turn off the screen after some minutes of inactivity.  If you want to play media files and turn off the screen, be sure you set the Media Player option "Allow screen saver during playback".  You need this for the power option and/or the blank screen saver to be effective.

-- Mark

I don't think any of these other answers do much good.  If you attempt to switch to a second monitor that doesn't exist, you'll get returned when Windows cannot find the second monitor.

Please post here if you have some method that accomplishes the goal of turning off the screen while allowing all other processes to continue.

I have to correct my last post after new developments with talking to the Answer desk. The previous support person was wrong in saying that the Pro 3 is configured for Hibernate by default. It turns out, there was a Hyper-V setting that was causing the Power Options to only show Hibernate, not Sleep as an available option. After turning Hyper-V off, the power options changed from Hibernate to Sleep. Now I can sleep my Surface Pro 3 by pressing the power button, yay!

To turn off the Hyper-V setting, go to Add Remove Programs, select Add Remove Programs, then click Turn Windows Features On or Off, and finally uncheck the Hyper-V option.

Although I don't now how this setting got turned on in the first place, I suspect installing Visual Studio 2013 did it.

The problem is worse on Surface Pro 3, where the Sleep option has been completely removed from Power Options on this device. On the Pro 3, you only get two options, Turn off display and Hibernate. And note that Hibernate is turned off be default for the two cases of Battery and Plugged In. I found this out the hard way when my Pro 3 was dead each morning if I left it on the night before but not plugged in. The display would turn off but the thing would not go into hibernate because of the default setting to not hibernate at all whether on battery or plugged in. A stupid default setting if you ask me! And a waste of two hours of my time calling microsoft to figure it out, I was ready to return the device as defective -- and by the way, the support person did not figure it out, I had to, but she did help. Once I discovered the difference, she confirmed that indeed the Sleep option, which is only available on the Pro and Pro 2, was removed from the Pro 3, hence the difference in settings between these devices.

So if you are looking to put your Surface Pro 3 to SLEEP by pressing the POWER button, think again! You are making it hibernate! Be prepared to wait for the thing to wake up from hibernate next time you press the button.

I too am very disappointed that there is no option to press the power button to Turn Off Display Only. As JRC369 indicated, using the "Second screen only" option causes problems if there isn't actually a second screen! So no viable workaround. Unacceptable! Why can I turn off the display on my phone or any other touch device, but not the Surface Pro?!

It would be nice to have a solution. I'm doing some background work that is not highly CPU intensive but with the screen on it certainly drains my battery. We clearly need to decouple turning off the screen from the sleep.