UD-3900 + Win8.1 Some error occurs, alert is worse than the error, responsiveness takes a nosedive

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Running Win8.1 on a i7 ultrabook. Connected to the 3900 I have a dual-bay HD dock (with 2 HDs) (USB3), 2 1080P monitors (HDMI, DVI-D), wireless KB+mouse, a USB2 DVD drive, a USB3 thumb drive, and an iPhone 4s.

Two problems I have noticed:

  1. Occasionally the wireless KB+mouse will go dead. Unplugging and re-plugging the wireless dongle works every time for recovery.

2.a Occasionally the laptop will start beeping, every 7 or secnods, continuously. It’s not a familiar Windows beep, it’s a multi-note sequence. When the beep sounds, mouse is completely unresponsive for about 7 seconds, and then recovers for a second. The unresponsive mouse occurs ONLY when the mouse cursor is on one of the 3900-connected displays. When the mouse cursor is on the laptop’s internal display, there is no responsiveness problem.

2.b When this beeping occurs, I assume it is an error alert from the Plugable 3900 docking station. Disconnecting the 3900 and reconnecting the 3900 seems to remedy the beeping as well as the unresponsiveness.

2.c While this problem (beeps, unresponsiveness) seems to be associated with the 3900, and I assume this to be an error alert mechanism, I am unaware of any error message or alert box which would clarify the nature of the error or the possible cause of the error. This is all assumption, of course, perhaps you can shed some light on this.

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Hi Bob,

We sent the response below via email, but as we did not receive a reply, we are posting it here as well just in case the email ended up in your spam filter.

Very unusual behavior regarding the beeping - I’m curious to help get to the bottom of it. The docking station is not designed to generate any audible error alerts. It certainly seems like a fairly low-level error if it’s generating tones from the laptop.

A few quick questions:
-You mention the intermittent nature of the issue. How often, on average, would you say it occurs?
-Does the mouse/kb issue occur more or less frequently?
-Does your ultrabook have any USB 2.0 ports? If so, can we test the dock on a 2.0 port to see if the issues are still present?

Also, I think our troubleshooting tool, Plugdebug, will be helpful in this situation. It will gather various DisplayLink logs and driver version info that might help provide some insight into what’s happening when this behavior occurs. It can be downloaded here:
http://plugable.com/support/plugdebug

For the best results, we’ll want to run it (with the dock and peripherals attached) after you’ve just recently encountered the error condition/beeping so that the logs will contain the most relevant data.

Thanks!
Gary