My sager 9860 is given me some trouble lately. I have had it over a year and half ago it was doing fine, but when i formatted it was ok until a week ago when i had to turn it on and off to get it working. the first time i turned it on it was a black screen but i can hear and i saw the lights turning on, but the screen is black so i shut it off and on. Can someone tell me what is wrong?

This just started happening on mine as well. Is it the video card? I was running a 9880 and the computer boots up but just a black screen. Any ideas?

Yeah same problem. Has anyone figured out the problem? Is it the battery?

Tried the external monitor trick? Plug one in and see any differences?

cheers ...

My black screen issue happens BEFORE the bios kicks in??? The DVD player will just sit and cycle, the fans will kick in, but the screen doesn't show the bios boot sequence. It's been a degrading thing. It was only happening occasionally then continued to do it more and more, now it looks as if it's terminal. Looks like it may be time to build a desktop again. I'm not sinking more money into repairing this again!

ALSO, just prior to going terminal, I would be playing a game and the laptop would go black and lock up! I'm talking about any game, no matter how old it was.

Try some different graphic drivers and see. I have a very bad feeling that this is gpu "fail" related dingy.

cheers ...

All right, I'm gonna try some stuff. I found out that if I let the laptop sit for a while and cool off, it will boot. I then let it sit and idle for a week and everything was ok (had to leave town). I used it for trivial tasks, the most taxing being transferring files to an older desktop and everything was still fine. I started playing BF2142 and it crashed, let it sit for a couple hours, rebooted, ran just fine again. I'm thinking this is a video heating problem. So here's what I'm gonna try:

I'm going to completely replace the video card/heatsink and take out the winmodem so I can reattempt to install XP SP3 (a different problem, something another person said fixed their problem). I now have 2 questions. What is the biggest baddest card I can put in this machine? Can I remove/swap these components without disassembling the entire laptop case? I'm unfamiliar with the internal location of these components, but I'm completely capable of following directions. I've had all the bottom covers off this thing at one time or another but don't recognize what's what. The video card should have a fan attached, but I'm not sure where it's at.

I had to send it back a while ago to get the motherboard replaced and the paperwork returned said it had a 9890 m/b put in it. I'm currently running a GeForce 6800 GO 256MB card in it, can someone tell me the max card I can put in it?

I still love this machine, it's still a solid performer when it's running. I don't want to give up on it just yet if it's only gonna take minor stuff to get it back on it's feet.