I wanted to get a docking station setup for the home office. I did some research and decided to use a Dell D/Port. This allows you to dock your Latitude notebook to the device and then use an external display, keyboard, mouse, speakers, network connection, etc. It's pretty slick and I thought it along with a D/Monitor Stand would work great. I bought a Kensington Notebook Expansion Dock for a co-worker and she was never really happy with how it integrated with her Dell Notebook computer, so I figured to get the Dell D/Port since its a Dell product, designed specifically for D-series notebooks..
So another issue came up when we started using the D/Port. Sometimes, when starting up the notebook computer when it is in the D/Port, the external monitor would go blank. The only way to fix this would be to un-dock the laptop shut it down and plug it back in. I did some searching in the web to see if this was a common issue but didn't find anything that was exactly similar. I figured it was caused by the different display resolutions of the built-in notebook display and the external monitor. For some reason this was causing the external monitor to go blank. I looked at the Event Viewer and couldn't find an error message that was related to this problem.
I don't really like calling Dell support unless I know specifically what is wrong with my computer system, since it can take hours of my time to have the service technicians run through all the standard diagnostic tests before they agree with me that something is wrong. (I am the tech support person where I work, and when I know that a specific item on a computer is bad, say a DVD burner is malfunctioning, Dell is great at sending a replacement item out quickly to me, but when there is just general, "problems," it can be painful to work with the tech support to find a solution.)
So, again I didn't call Dell with my problem, since it was an intermittent problem and not a show stopper.
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Hello, I too am having display problems. It all started about a week ago when I used my laptop with a projector for a class. My first symptom was the automatic gorwing of everything on the screen. So large that nothgin was readable. I had noticed this once before on a coworkers laptopn when he connected to the projector. Now that I'm back at my desk and plugged into my port replicator, I can not get my external display to come on, it stays in standby no matter what I do. If I try to use the F8(CRT/LCD) key to change it, then the automatic screen growth begins again and the only way to correct it is to restart the system.
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