Just got the UGA-2K-A product for christmas, was super excited to add a second monitor! Opened the package, plugged it into my machine, located it ok, download drivers, restart, pop-up balloon telling me it was incompatible with the gfx card or operating system…
I proceeded to check the graphics adapter driver, saw ‘standard vga’, found the right one (ATI ES1000) and updated, reinstalled the UGA-2k-A drivers (using 5.5 from DisplayLink), restart, same problem…
Now, I know that there is no support for W2k8/W2k3 because of some commercial issues, and what not, however my machine is running a fully valid version of Windows 7 Enterprise N x64. I went through a great deal of effort, for my wife, to make sure this would be compatible with my system and now, it is not, for some unknown reason. I have posted with DisplayLink forums, but have received no answers, as of yet… I am not sure what I am supposed to do here, as I am quite aggravated…
As a side note, the disc will not work either, luckily i was able to retrieve drivers through windows/internet. Also, the GUI will not load or run, no matter how much I try…
Thank you for you response, although not the best news, it re-affirms my own conclusion about the issue at hand… I will return the product within the next few days, although I am sad, at least I am resolved. I must now work on getting my company to get me a new box
**UPDATE 1/13/2011**
I decided to keep the product because of how easily and perfectly it worked with my laptop at home. I simply plugged it into the usb, waited for Windows 7 to “do it’s hardware thing”, opened the display options (from the desktop) and setup the monitor, easy as pie! My laptop is a sony vaio that is less than a year old, installed with Windows 7 Ultimate x64. My workaround solution is going to be as follows:
Keep my work pc plugged in and on, at the office. Bring my laptop in, using remote desktop to link into my work pc (under the table), connect my two work monitors into my laptop (my laptop, by design like most, has a second monitor output port built-in, I will use the UGA-2K-A device for the other monitor), effectively giving me 3 monitors (including my actual laptop screen).
I was very impressed at the simplicity of install/use on a supported machine and decided to keep the product.
Hi Steve - DisplayLink is the company who creates the chips and the Windows drivers for all the good USB graphics devices available today. You can’t get the functionality users want (Windows treating the USB display as “just another monitor”) without the DisplayLink drivers. And there is no equivalent alternative. That said, it is possible to do creative things with the hardware. For example, you can use one of these adapters on a system like the one in this thread, and assign the USB device to a vmware VM (this only works with vmware), and then use the USB display as another monitor for that VM. That would work, for example, on Jasons’ system, even though the host copy of Windows can’t use the device. But it’s not want people expect or want normally, so I don’t even mention it.
@Steve Unfortunately the drivers will not work correctly, meaning essentially, my machine can’t talk to the device correctly, and vice versa. So it’s a definitive “no-go” on my type of machine. However, using the device on my newer laptop (less than 1yr old) worked perfectly and I was easily able to connect another monitor to my laptop!
Thanks for posting - I’m very sorry, I’m afraid I won’t have good news for you.
DisplayLink-based products require a WDDM-compatible GPU to install on Vista and Windows 7 (WDDM is the native graphics driver model of Vista and Windows 7). This is because the DisplayLink driver depends on using the main GPU for rendering and OS integration in Vista and Win7, and does that through WDDM.
This isn’t a problem in and of itself for recent graphics cards (nearly all shipped since Windows Vista).
Unfortunately, the Dell PowerEdge SC440 is from before this era - it was originally shipped with Windows Server 2003 installed. Unfortunately as is common for server systems, the system had a low-end GPU for the time (I think the SC440 first shipped in 2004) – the ATI ES1000 as you mentioned.
The ATI ES1000 does not have a WDDM compatible driver, and it’s clear from discussions elsewhere is too old to have one developed at this point. While you can get the graphics running on Vista and XP, it appears to be running the older XP driver model, which will have a bunch of limitations, including no DisplayLink support. It will also be quite slow, which might make driving the extra screens undesirable also.
And unfortunately, Dell apparently actively limited this system to prevent people from using the server as a client PC – they limited the PCIe add in slots to 1x speed (see http://en.community.dell.com/support-…), so it looks like it’s possible but tricky to find a more modern video card to upgrade to. Almost certainly not worth the trouble on this system.
I’m sorry to have to deliver the bad news that we can’t help upgrade this system. We don’t ever want customers to be stuck with hardware that doesn’t work for them – please make use of our no hassle 30 day returns on your UGA-2K-A unit. Just visit http://www.amazon.com/gp/css/returns/… to trigger the process. Just let us know if you have any trouble.
Thanks again for going out of your way to contact us to figure out the story.
