I bought the “Plugable USB 3.0 Dual 4K HDMI 2.0 Adapter with Gigabit Ethernet” product. The problem is that about once per week, the display goes blank and the monitor shows an on-screen message saying “no input detected”. In other words, it acts as though there is nothing plugged into it at all. (This will often happen complete out of the blue when I am not even using the computer, but I see the signal drop from across the room.)
The ONLY way to fix this is to reboot the computer. Simply unplugging the HDMI cable from the adapter (or the adapter’s cable from my laptop’s USB 3.0 port) and then replugging it does not work. Which doesn’t make much sense…suggests that something within the firmware is getting corrupted. I have the latest DisplayLinka drivers installed.
Hello, thanks for posting and I will be happy to help.
Thanks for the description of the behavior you are seeing. Based off of your description we’ll want to reinstall the DisplayLink software and run the DisplayLink cleaner tool to make sure that the software used by our adapter is in a good state. To do so, please follow these steps:
Disconnect the adapter from your system. Please keep it disconnected until the last step.
Uninstall any and all software with ‘DisplayLink’ in the title that is present from within the Control Panel -> Programs and Features. Don’t worry if these entries are not present or if the process does not work, just move onto the next step
Reconnect the adapter to your system which will trigger the final portion of the installation
If those steps do not help, does disabling USB Selective Suspend help? We have seen some evidence that this helps in similar situations with USB attached displays, so I am curious if it help at all here. To do so, here is a good guide if needed –> https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/7… for disabling selective suspend.
Thanks for the reply; I ran the Cleaner then reinstalled the DisplayLink software per your instructions, but it did not help: my USB monitor crashed/froze 3 times today (requiring a reboot each time.) I have disabled Selective Suspend, and will report back, though I’m not optimistic. A couple more things about the crash symptoms in case it helps:
When the monitor crashes, it actually doesn’t go dark right away: rather **whatever picture it was displaying stays permanently frozen on the monitor**…but the USB “device disconnected” sound plays, and the laptop acts as though that display is not connected at all…but oddly, the image stays frozen in place on the monitor (though obviously I can’t move my mouse onto that screen…it’s just a frozen still image of whatever the monitor was displaying when it crashed.) If I unplug the USB cable, THAT will make the screen go dark (and plugging it back in does not bring any picture back…the monitor just stays dark until I reboot.) Not sure if this helps diagnose, it’s just an odd behavior.
It would still be helpful – even if we can’t get to the bottom of this – if we could at least get me to a place where **I can get the picture back WITHOUT A COMPUTER REBOOT** As I’ve written above, when the monitor crashes, the ONLY way to bring it back to life is with a laptop reboot…if I could somehow get it working again WITHOUT having to reboot my machine, that would be a big help. Just what’s going on when the USB monitor crashes/freezes? Is it a type of corruption/crash that can be remedied without a reboot?
Hello, thanks for the reply. Depending on the results with disabling USB selective suspend next step would be to send you a replacement adapter to ensure the hardware within the adapter is working properly. We can reach out to your email used to register on the forums directly to facilitate this process. The behavior you describe sounds like the adapter could be causing this behavior that requires a whole system reboot.
Alright, thanks. Hasn’t crashed yet, but that doesn’t tell us much since it’s gone days without crashing before only to crash 3 times the next day.
But as to the 2nd part of my question above, can you think of any steps I can take that – if the crash happens again – would allow me to get the display working again WITHOUT a full system reboot? That would also be a huge help…is there some system process that i can kill / repair / restart / etc, that would fix the USB monitor connection without a reboot? Or to put it another way: just what is it about a system reboot that fixes the problem…what is it that happens during the reboot process and can we emulate it without the reboot itself?
(Jumping in briefly for David) The theory that makes the most sense given that the system needs a reboot to recover is that the USB controller on the laptop is hanging.
A good way to test this next time the display freezes is to unplug the display adapter, then plug something else into that USB port. If the other device you try also doesn’t work, then that would confirm that the controller in the system is locking up for some reason.
We’ll look forward to seeing the logs to help us analyze further about any possible fixes that don’t involve a reboot.
I’m re-visiting this issue (last updated a year ago), because this issue has actually never gotten better for me, but I just lived with it and never came back to this thread. Moreover, the most recent other post in this subforum seems to describe exactly the same crash problem. Additionally, if you read the Amazon reviews for this adapter, more than 10 of the total 43 reviews for this product complain of this same crash/freeze(!!)…there’s clearly a pervasive defect with the hardware…in the year since I posted here has Plugable gotten to the bottom of what is quite clearly a bug affecting a large percentage of its users?
In case it helps further troubleshoot, I’ve followed all of the directions that I’ve seen given to users who complain about this behavior, including:
removed, cleaned, and reinstalled the DisplayLink software (i now have 9.0.1809)
disabled the USB selective suspension thing
Nothing helped. Some additional info, in response to Gary’s suggestion in the most recent post in this thread: I did as you suggested and when the display froze, I disconnected it and reconnected a DIFFERENT usb device (my mouse) to that USB port, and it worked. So the crash isn’t because the USB port itself is dying/being corrupted. But here’s a curious thing I discovered that might help: when the display crashes, I can disconnect it from the USB port and plug it into a DIFFERENT USB PORT on the same machine, and it will work. Furthermore, I discovered that if I did that and kept working away, and then it crashed again (when plugged into the 2nd port) – which sometimes happened – I could actually switch it back to the FIRST port, where it was originally plugged in before crashing, and it would resume working again (not ALWAYS, but sometimes). So as you can see, I don’t know precisely what’s going on, but there’s some sequential dance of crashing / unplugging / switching-ports that seems to let me recover functionality…but there’s not a firm rhyme or reason to it. Hopefully this curious behavior helps troubleshoot whatever’s going on…
But either way, it’s clear there’s a pervasive defect with this product, given the deluge of complaints describing the exact same crash, so it feels as though a refund or replacement of some sort might be in order…?
More info that I think is relevant to your troubleshooting: when USB Selective Suspend is disabled (one of the troubleshooting steps offered), the crash behavior is slightly different than what I described in my Aug 20 10:12pm post in this thread (describing the crash behavior when SS is enabled). When SS is DISabled, the screens disconnect and go dark immediately (rather than the image staying frozen on the screens)…not only that, but within 2 minutes all 3 USB ports on my laptop stop working and a full system reboot is the only thing that can restore their functionality. The Device Manager also shows an error icon – see attached screenshot
This seems to jive with my understanding of what Selective Suspend is and what it does…i.e. when disabled, when there’s a crash on one of my 3 USB ports, the entire controller crashes and needs a reboot. Whereas when it’s ENABLED, only the specific port where the crash happened is disabled. (So, in effect, having SS disabled per your suggestion actually makes the problem WORSE, in that when the monitors crash, every USB port and devices connected to them are rendered inoperable until a reboot…whereas having SS enabled allowed me to at least plug the Plugable adapter into a different port and restore functionality (until it too crashes), as described in my post above.
**In any case, this post and the one above it should give you a good lead on what’s going wrong…**but it seems pretty clear that something about the adapter is corrupting the USB port into which it’s plugged…and the deluge of identical complaints in these forums and Amazon reviews suggests that it’s a widespread issue…hoping you’ve got a solution for me, or we can alternatively talk refund / replacement.
Thanks for following up and providing excellent details. I am sorry to hear that this issue was not resolved.
To be transparent, this has been an ongoing issue with our adapters that does not affect all customers, but it can manifest unexpectedly using a wide variety of systems and monitor combinations. We have been unable to reproduce these behaviors that customers have described with inventory we have on hand nor when we receive adapters in return and testing with identical models of systems and monitors. While an absolute resolution has not been found, we continue to investigate and gather data points to provide to our engineers.
You’ve already tried the DisplayLink cleaner steps and disabling USB selective suspend (although the behavior you describe when all USB ports become disabled is not expected, either), so the next steps would be to send you a new replacement adapter that has been stress tested overnight (~8 hours) running two 4K displays and playing two 4K videos. Additionally, I would include a powered USB hub in order to troubleshoot further in the event that the replacement adapter behaves in the same manner. One theory we have is that some systems’ power output from the USB port is marginal and causes a hang on the USB port/bus which can only recover from a reboot.
Additionally, we can attempt to employ the help of DisplayLink (the manufacturer of the DL-6950 chip that our adapters use) in order to assist in investigations and we would just ask to send us an output of their DisplayLink Windows Support tool with ‘Advanced Logging’ enabled in order to try and capture this behavior while the USB bus is in the hung state.
Lastly, have you encountered this behavior on multiple systems? Understood if you do not have additional systems to compare results.
Of course, if you’d prefer a refund rather than additional troubleshooting or investigations please let me know and we can proceed accordingly.
