Using external Acer monitor off HP Windows 7 laptop. Was working fine but usually have to reboot once a day. Now desktop icons do not appear on external mointor. My wallpaper photo is there but no icons. Waddup?
Hi Ron,
Thanks for posting. Both for icons and for the Windows task bar, Windows will move them back to the primary screen whenever the secondary screen goes away.
Can you confirm if the icons are there on your primary display, and that you can drag and drop them back over to the USB attached display?
Because USB-attached displays come and go, in the end we recommend leaving icons and start menu on your primary display – just to avoid the frustration of things moving on you when you don’t expect it.
You’re bound to run across this anyway (dock/undock), but can you say more about what’s causing you to reboot once a day? What behavior do you see?
Thanks again!
Bernie
Thanks Bernie. hahaha…just found the answer. For some reason the monitor settings had changed from “duplicate” to “extend,” so rather than having two identical monitors as I had before I had an extension of my primary monitor, which is not what i wanted.
As to the reboot issue, i can’t really say if there is a pattern but the system has locked up several times…mouse freezes. I will try to be more observant and see if a pattern developes that i can report to you. Thanks again for a rapid response…hope you take some time off for the game!
Glad the icons mystery is solved!
No doubt - I’m watching the game (my wife is a cheesehead, and I’m a childhood Steeler fan). Could get ugly!
Steel curtains tend to shred cheese, but then you’d be sleeping on the couch. Worth it? hahahaha
Bernie, you asked for an update on the need to reboot. It just happened. I was deleting messages in my Outlook Inbox using an external monitor and a wireless HP keyboard and mouse. the dongle for this is plugged directly into my laptop and not the Plugable USB 2.0 docking station. Mouse froze up onscreen. Unable to activiate any other functions. Rebooted Plugable and I’m back in business. My sense is this seems to happen when I am doing repetitive tasks quickly and the system gets overwhelmed. Unheard of! hahaha
Hi Ron,
Thanks for posting the additional detail on this.
To try and separate whether the problem was more with the mouse or the display - when you hit the problem, could you drag the mouse (or use the keyboard) and still see the resulting activity on the main (non-USB screen). In other words, was it just the USB screen that was visually frozen but everything else was fine? Or some other behavior?
Thanks again!
Bernie