I’ve been using the Pluggable USB 3.0 dock for a couple of years and it’s great because I can easily use any laptop with my desktop setup, I recently upgraded to a Surface Book and Windows 10 and the display has been flakey with the Pluggable setup. A couple times a day, video on my secondary monitors will stop refreshing correctly (open a new email and it still shows the old one). I also noticed that Windows Driver Foundation frequently holds at 20-25% CPU and causes my fan to run. I’m mostly just using Office or Skype. I’ve updated driver a few times and it doesn’t seem top help. Currently using DisplayLink 8.0.903.0 and latest Win10 build. I saw one other post on this problem but it’s locked and said updates have fixed it. I end up having to reboot a few times a day to avoid these issues and it’s pretty annoying. I love this product, but will probably have switch to a surface dock if I can’t figure out a fix (I have a surface dock which doesn’t do this). Happy to capture more data, dumps, etc. if that would help. Thanks!
Hi Reed,
Thanks for posting, and I would be happy to help with your docking station!
Thank you for the great details you provided about your setup and the behavior. A quick point of note, the Windows Driver foundation element you mention is in fact the process driving the displays. This is the result of a change in how Windows supports DisplayLink-based devices like our dock in Windows 10 Anniversary edition. There will always be some CPU usage associated with the process, and the amount can vary depending on what is being shown on the displays (I.e. video playback will require more resources than a static image).
The behavior you are seeing could potentially be caused by a few different things, but our first step is to have you update to the latest 8.1 version of the driver to see if that helps with the image not refreshing properly. If you would, please follow these steps:
- Disconnect the dock from the system and please remove the power cable from the dock so it turns off completely (this is important so the unit resets). 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
- Download, extract and run the DisplayLink cleaner tool version 8.1, found here –> https://s3.amazonaws.com/plugable/bin… and ensure it displays “Cleaning Complete” when done (video walk-through if you need it -> https://youtu.be/AcVV1gD_FvI)
- Once the Cleaner has been run, reboot (even if not prompted to)
- Now download and install the 8.1 M0 DisplayLink software, found here –> https://s3.amazonaws.com/plugable/bin…
- Reattach the power cable to the dock first. Once the dock is powered on, reconnect it to your system which will trigger the final portion of the installation. If the device is not detected, please click the ‘Skip’ button to allow the process to complete and reboot the system.
If that helps with the behavior, great! If not, please keep everything connected and send the output of our diagnostic utility PlugDebug –> http://plugable.com/support/plugdebug to support@plugable.com with ‘For Ticket 166977’ in the subject line. This will allow us to match everything up and examine some log files from your system to help determine the next steps. If you could also include your Amazon Order ID number in your email (don’t post that here) that would be most helpful.
Thank you,
Bob
Plugable Technologies
www.plugable.com/support
Thanks Bob. I went through all the steps and updated everything today. I will keep an eye on it and happy to collect data if the problem persists. I appreciate your help.
Thanks for getting back Reed, and you are of course very welcome.
Have a good day!
Bob