Monitor repair, is it DIY dooable

Yes. You will need a soldering iron, and not much (or any) burn cream.

Cases sometimes are clipped together, and part of the fun is undoing that without gouging out the material of the unit, or your fingers.

How to open the case of the SA300 Samsung LED Monitor

Then take care to avoid snapping wires while proceeding to remove the switch PCB, then fit a replacement.

Why not just leave it on and fit an in-line cord switch in the power cable?

Why not just leave it on full stop. I've not seen a monitor that doesn't go to sleep without a signal in a long time and there's bugger all current difference between that and "off".

Worth doing the measurement to be sure but the chances are that its standby mode is under 1W if the thing isn't truly ancient. Slaving all peripherals to the main PC with a smart extension block may be a larger saving as some laser printers are power hungry when in standby.

I only switch my monitors off when I am away.

Some good ideas, I never thought of an in-line cord switch.

I turn off my monitors, printers, ethernet switch, and USB 8 port unit "at the mains" by feeding them from the same spreader so that one switch does it all. I have the desktop base unit and the wifi on a separate spreader which I don't switch off because sometimes I will put the desktop into hibernate or sleep.

If your monitor switch is stuck in the "on" (rather than off) position I would certainly not try to fix it! If it is "buzzy" (i.e. not connecting very well) I would consider soldering little bridges across it.

It can be a bad idea to power off inkjet printers at this may force them to do a head clean every power on and hence greater ink usage.

I have the monitor, speakers etc powered from a current sensing power switch sent by the power co - this works well to power everthing down automatically.

Chris K

Beware that many (most?) sensing switches draw more power than the standby load of most modern appliances. Reason is that standby load is covered by tight regulations in most cases, but power requirements of current sensing switches is not. If the current sensing switch gets warm, it's probably not worth using with appliances which would drop into standby mode anyway.