My 9860 has one dead pixel...

Well I am sure they will charge you a fee for not having the original packaging. I dont know how much, though. How did you not notice when you opened the box in oregon? Or did you have it mailed to you from oregon by relatives?

i;d just keep it if i were you, you have about a 50/50 chance of getting another one with 1 or more dead pixels which could be in worse places after paying to ship your original back, modern lcd technology is flawed @ best and sagers dead pixel policy leaves much to be desired

You have to send it back within 30 days...

This is one of the issues that keeps me from purchasing a laptop. Can anyone post a picture of what one dead pixel looks like? It may seem silly, but that's a lot of mone to shell out, for something that should be perfect.

well, after trying i have come to the conclusion that it is virtually impossible to capture 1 dead pixel in a picture, but to get an example open paint, drag it out to the size of your desktop, fill it black and than click one red dot with the pencil tool thingy, it'l just do one red pixel and upon experimentation it looks just like an actual dead pixel, while browseing the web mines not too noticeable, but i cant use black backgrounds or it drives me crazy and they are VERY VERY noticeable when playing games, (which is 99% of what i use my notebook for )

Some people have had luck rubbing them out. Use a pencil eraser or a Q'Tip and gently rub it. It's worth a shot.

Thanks. Guess I could live with that...maybe...are they really that common? What causes this?

yes, roughly 50% of lcd screens have dead pixels(which is a great improvement really as when lcds were first introduced almost all lcds had at least one), many of which are just stuck black or grey which makes them much less noticeable(in fact most casual users that have dead pixels dont even notice them) than a "stuck" red ,green or other colored pixel, i'm not 100% sure what the cause of dead pixels is but i know they can also die out after you've had the lcd for awhile on their own. (massageing the pixel as a poster above stated can sometimes fix it roughly 1/4 of the time but your also risking ghosting your lcd when you do it, ghosting will basically make a part of your lcd lighter/darker where the tried to massage the pixel away)

What you have to remember is that there is well over a million pixels on your lcd (depending on your resolution). So one bad one is not bad, until you think about how much you just paid for your laptop. And once you've seen them, there is no way you don't notice them every time you look at your screen.

I found this explanation on another site. Seems like a good one:

It could be wrong or dead electric connections to activate the pixels. Or it could be also a problem in the polarising film.
A LCD screen has a backlight, and that light is polarised thru a filter. Another substrate, parallel, is the "programable" polarizer. The "programmable" polarizer is capable to either polarize the light in a direction rotated 90* or to let it pass (or polarize in the same direction as the other filter). When the direction of polarisation is rotated 90*, the screen blacketh ( ). If not, the light can go thru, and a lighted spot appears.
The "programmable" polarizer is controlled with voltages (electric fields, like in condensers). The presence of the field changes the polarisation plane, compared to the absence of the electric field. Those "cells" (which are sub-pixels on a color screen) keep their information thanks to some "static RAM" cells, so no refresh is needed.
Well, when one or more of the transistors are defective, the (sub)pixel can be either dead (black) or stuck (white).

Interesting. Thanks.

We can try to post by post troubleshoot to get things going, or it would probably be easily to call our tech support to walk you through it again and see if we can find anything while on the phone that may be causing your problem.

Well on one of my laptops once I had a dead pixil bang... bright blue in the corner

so all i did was lightly rub it with my knuckle and it went away... You could try this... if you havent already

I had mine for like two weeks and sent it in for the stuck Fan issue and noted that it also had a stuck RED pixel REALLY close to the center area (2 inches down from the webcam and 1 inch to the right).

I got my machine back with a new bios (I could have done this), several scratches in the lid , and a note stating the pixel wasn't in the center of the screen. On top of this they COULD have put the new GPU plate in but didn't.
I even had to hound them on the status of my machine.

Mind you I only live 30 some odd miles from Sager and I still paid 40 bux for insured shipping and had to hound them to get back my scratched up unit after almost 2 weeks.

Should I decide to upgrade the graphics card I am going to PERSONALLY deliver it, take photos of the case, and see if I can't get it done on the spot or if they can just give me the damn parts.

Good Luck with yours!

Thats a stickler about the shipping and condition on the laptop... Well for the new card... depends on how much it will cost... If its cheep go ahead and do it... If its pricey its probably not worth it...