I recently inherited an old monitor that a friend was going to recycle as e-waste after he upgraded. It was a decent brand with a 1080p resolution and a refresh rate that I figured was passable for casual gaming.
I was excited about the prospect of having a secondary display, so I was grateful for the generosity. The display’s image looked fine to me. But, being a tech guy, I thought I’d also run some diagnostics to check on its color, contrast, and resolution.
One of the tests I ran was to look for dead or stuck pixels, which I’ve heard can haunt some monitors. Low and behold, I uncovered a few stuck pixels lurking to the left of center.
They weren’t anything to cry home about, being just a few tiny dots — some monitors have it so bad that they’re almost unusable — but I set about fixing them anyway using a site called Piksel Test. I managed to get rid of them all too, so I’m going to use this test on all the screens I get from now on.
If you’re in a similar boat with any of the screens you own, be that a monitor, cellphone, TV, or tablet (LCD or OLED screen), you can do the same thing.
What to do
- Turn on your PC and wait for Windows to load.
- Connect to the internet and go to the Piksel Test website.
- Click on the Test Dead Pixel button.
- Take note of any dead or stuck pixels on your screen. The website has an explanation about how to identify each of those problem pixel types.
- Now scroll down the Piksel Test page and click on Dead Pixel Repair or Stuck Pixel Repair depending on what kind of pixels you discovered.
- Run the pixel fixer window over the pixels you want to repair for 10 minutes.
Keep the pixel fixer window on the stuck or dead pixels for approximately 10 minutes.
Dominic Bayley / Foundry
Tip: Your screen needs to be active for the duration of the fix, so turn off your sleep settings in Windows before you begin.
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