Why do the monitors black out when I have 2 stations connected?

Hey, So currently I have two Plugable UD-160-A to my laptop. I am using the Windows 7 64-bit operating system and there seems to be an interesting problem. First, I want to thank you Bernie for the quick response on the replacement (I will ship back the defective station once this problem is solved). Second, the problem is that when I move my cursor two one of the two monitors connected to the Docking station, it turns all black and when I click on the screen, only a box of 10 or so pixels show and I have to either move a window or my mouse and click everywhere on the screen for the monitor to show the screen. Unfortunately, if I move my mouse cursor and then move it back to the monitors, they turn all black again.

I have restarted twice, but are there any other problems? It seems like when there is only one docking station connected, it works fine, but when there are 2 it begins to act weird.

Thanks Bernie! I have faith!

Hey Bernie, I think I caught what was causing the problem: Avira Anti-vir Personal. When I disable it, the blacking out is no longer a problem, but when I activate it, it is the same as before, blacking out the monitor when I move the cursor over. Is there a way I can have both Avira Anti-vir and the Plugable Docking stations together simultaneously? Thanks

Oh and more specifically, its the disabling of Avira AntiVir “Guard” function.

Hey Bernie. I believe they are different issues. The first time was fixed with te reboot. After rebooting, the monitor worked well. At that time, the other docking station was not functional and I was not using an antivirus program. So, while waiting for a replacement I installed Avira Antivir Personal. When I got the replacement, I was happy to see both of them work.

Unfortunately, I noticed the blacking out of the screen. I tried redrafting a couple of times and this past time, I realized that there would be a period of time where there would be no problems. I narrowed it down to start up programs. Disabled and closed certain things.

Thats when I found out when I disabled Avira Antivir Guard, there would be no problems! So the problem now is trying to get both Avira and docking stations working together at the same time. Thanks!

Hey Bernie. That will be great. I’ll get Microsoft and return the defective station once I get back to the apartment from Thanksgiving.

Will I be notified once DisplayLink is whitelisted?

And thank you again so much!

Thanks Daniel. I’ll post a link here to a public report of the problem to DisplayLink, that will let you track it …

Thanks for your patience!

Hey Bernie,

Unfortunately, with Avira Antivir uninstalled, there are still blacking out and flickering of the monitors. I am thinking of recording a video for you when I get home and see if the symptoms were seen before. I guess I should actually inform you of the setup: 3 external monitors and the laptop monitor:

Dell #1: Connected via Displaylink adapter (VGA)
Dell #2: Connected via laptop (VGA port)
LG #1: Connected via Displaylink Adapter (DVI)
Laptop monitor: self-explanatory.

Dell #2 is working perfectly fine with no blacking out and very minimal, if any flickering.

Dell #1 and LG #1 (Displaylink-connected) would black out and reveal itself little by little (I know, this sounds strange, so I would like to record a video of what exactly I’m talking about).

Oh, and I also realized that it happens sometimes when it is just one Displaylink adapter connected. Do you think I have too many processes running that the adapter cannot handle it? I hope this can be solved! It works well, but the minor annoyances have gotten to me little-by-little.

Thank you and happy Thanksgiving!

Daniel

Hi Daniel - can you email your Amazon order # and a phone number for us to reach you, to support@plugable.com? Since we’ve struggled with this (e.g. not sure now how the presence of Avira affects things), it’d be good to get on the phone and talk through everything to see if we can get this figured out. Sorry and thanks for your patience!

Hey Bernie!

I just got back to school from home and I figured it out! I am re-installing Avira as I am replying and I found the culprit. I wanted to change my background and so I had to change my settings. I was currently on the High Contrast Theme and when I changed that, it no longer flickered. Apologies for the false alarm on Avira, but yeah, it works now and I’ll be shipping the other unit back soon!

Thank you for the awesome support and great communication. Take care and I hope you had a good Thanksgiving!

Thanks for the update Daniel! Great news. Please feel free to contact us again (here or support@plugable.com) if anything turns out to be amiss. Thank you!

Hi Daniel - Thank you!

Thanks for figuring out that the Avira AntiVir http://www.avira.com/en/avira-free-an… was the source of the conflict. It appears like it was stopping one of the components of the DisplayLink driver from working, which was causing the screen update problems.

This is the second instance of an antivirus conflict that we’ve run across. The other is Cisco Security Agent http://getsatisfaction.com/plugable/t… http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/s…

It seems like the other major anti-virus software products, including those from Norton, McAfee, and Microsoft are fine.

So we need both a short term workaround and a longer term solution.

  1. We’ll report this problem to DisplayLink, get them to confirm the Avira problem and either get whitelisted by Avira or get the behavior that’s getting flagged fixed. We’ll take the lead on this, but welcome any of your help.

  2. In the short term, we need to get you an alternative to Avira. What I’d recommend is http://www.microsoft.com/security_ess… I know it’s not exactly the same set of features, but we use it here.

Let us know if this works for you. While sometimes limitations are unavoidable, we don’t expect users to live with them for the time it takes to fix them. So just let us know if you’d rather get a refund on the product - that would be no problem at all. Please just let us know.

Again, thanks for tracking down the conflict!

Bernie