Monitor boot does musical chairs

USB Hubs USB2-HUB-AG7
1

Three monitors and one mac mini 2.3 ghz running leopard. The monitors- 2 Viewsonics, one old, one new, one beautiful Dell. The problem. The main monitor in the boot sequence always boots. The secondary and tertiary monitors, not so much. It’s like they’re picky, first this one goes one, then that one. They alternate. Makes things hard to find. Important fact: using the plugable technologies usb hub, which supplies the necessary power levels for all three monitors. Belkin could not do this, nor other, generic hubs.

2

Hi Barnaby,

Thanks for posting! Let’s figure out what could be causing this inconsistent behavior of external displays!

Some quick questions to understand the setup and the issue better -:

  1. Is the main monitor is connected through the inbuilt HDMI port on the mac mini through the HDMI to DVI Adapter and the other two monitors are connected through USB Graphics Adapters connecting to the mac mini via the Plugable USB hub or are all the three monitors connected through USB Graphics Adapters connecting to the mac mini via the Plugable USB hub ?

  2. I am assuming that you are connecting the external monitors through the Plugable 7-Port USB 2.0 Hub. Is my assumption correct?

  3. What are the make and model(s) of the devices connected through the Plugable Hub?

  4. Which model of Plugable Graphics adapter(s) are you using?

  5. When you say that “The secondary and tertiary monitors, not so much. It’s like they’re picky, first this one goes one, then that one.”- do you mean that only one of them boots (inconsistent as to which monitor boots) or that they both boot but there is a time delay between when the display on the monitors show up and the order in which they come up is different every time?

Once you reply with this information we will figure out the next steps.

Thanks for your patience while we figure this out!

Regards,
Roze

3

Hi Barnaby,

Thanks for posting! Sorry for the frustration - let’s try to get it figured out.

First off, three quick questions:

  1. Can you confirm that you’re using the AC power adapter for our hub? (a quick way to check for certain is to unplug the USB connection between hub and PC - if the power LED is still on, the AC adapter is working)

  2. It sounds like the monitors have problems every once in a while - can you say how often? And if you unplug/replug the USB connection to each monitor’s adapter, does that solve it for that moment?

  3. Can you say what version of DIsplayLink’s Mac drivers you’re using with Mac 10.6 Leopard? DisplayLink has a new 1.7 beta 4 driver (mostly focused on Lion issues), but which may be relevant: http://displaylink.org/forum/showthre…

Thanks - the answers here will help us figure out next steps.

Thanks for your patience!
Bernie

4

Sorry, you get double the support on weekends when people are working from home!

Roze and I are coming at things from different directions, but both sets of questions could help in ruling out potential causes (not enough power at the hub; whether a 2nd inbuilt graphics port on the Mac might be playing a part; displaylink driver issues).

If you want to reply to each set of questions in turn, we promise to only have one of us figure out next steps from there!

Bernie

5

We got your reply to support@plugable.com and are working on it. Thanks!