Last week after a Teams meeting, the two external monitors (Display 2 and 3) could not be detected properly. They were detected, which means the monitors did not show the moving "no signal", but they were not active and the monitors were black. I looked up online and found that most people complain that the external display cannot show up when the lid is closed. Ironically, if I closed my laptop's lid, both external displays showed perfectly fine, without any problems! It was very annoying.
I have done several power cycles, like unplugging the dock from the laptop, unplugging the power for the dock, and restarting my laptop... I also implemented the Dell command update. Neither of them worked.
Today I requested a replacement of the dock. I had a bad feeling about the replacement before I even started setting up. When I plugged in the new dock to my laptop, I found that the Display 3 using HDMI had a very coarse resolution that cannot be changed. The display setting for it was greyed out and said "Display 3: No monitor". Though the Display 3 works well if directly connected to the laptop via HDMI cable.
This article (Can’t change Screen Resolution in Windows 11/10) said the primary reason for this issue is driver misconfiguration. Our office IT support worked really hard with me to reinstall all the drivers: DisplayLink docker driver, DisplayLink USB Graphics Software for Windows 10, Dell monitor driver... At the beginning, the DisplayLink docker driver could not be successfully upgraded. IT support ran a DisplayLink Installation Cleaner first, and then the docker driver was finally installed. After each installation, I did not connect to the dock and reboot my laptop. However, updating these drivers did not help and the problem remained the same. The article also suggested checking the GPU scaling and NVIDIA Control Panel. But I couldn't find "Display" under the Control Panel.
It came to a dead end. Both IT support and I were exhausted and frustrated. Suddenly, IT support suggested me use DP cable instead of the HDMI cable. He suggested swap the HDMI cable and DP cable which was a fantastic idea that I did not think of before. I tried swapping and found that the Display 3 using DP cable worked well and then the Display using HDMI became problematic. There is the conclusion: the dock has a compatibility issue with the HDMI connection! Fortunately I have an additional DP cable and I replace it with the HDMI. Now both external displays work.
In summary, the external monitors are set up properly using the DP cables - thanks to IT support's brilliant idea. We did not solve the driver issue for the HDMI & dock, though. Hopefully this post can help people who have similar issues.
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