Sunday, April 1, 2018

Lenovo USB 3 Docking Station Disturbed by Webinar Software

Update.  

As shown below, my two year old Lenovo 3.0 Docking Station starting generating device errors every 45 seconds.   After a couple hours of troubleshooting, deleting all "webinar" apps (like GoToMeeting) seemed to fix it.   Right.  For about 24 hours.  Then it was as bad as before.  Go figure.

I ended up going to Staples and getting a USB-to-VGA box (J5Create JUA311).   So for the time being, I'm ignoring the Lenovo dock, and running my home office off the labtop, a simple 4-socket USB hub, and two monitors with (A) the MiniDVI driver driving a DVI monitor and (B) the JUA311 driving a VGA monitor.    

I got a new Lenovo USB 3.0 Docking Station and it works fine, so the old one really had some kind of electromechanical failure after two years.   Interesting that my software deletion seemed to fix it for 24 hours.  Mystery.


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[Adding to a long information center chain about Lenovo Docking Station malfunctions, characterized by a "Device not recognized" flag every 45 seconds].

My problem was fixed by some combination of uninstalling Adobe and also uninstalling several Webinar apps.

In April 2018, I had the same problem, every 45 seconds monitors would blink off and a window would pop up "USB device recently plugged in not recognized."  I did various routine troubleshooting, reinstalling Lenovo 3.0 Dock drivers, running a Displaylink failure detection app, running various device driver update apps like Lenovo and Windows Updaters.   None of this worked.  Changing physical ports did not help.  

FIX.  After this hour or two,  I went to Control Panel and uninstalled several programs in one sitting (Adobe PDF software [I used a simpler PDF reader], and several Webinar apps like Zoom and Gotomeeting).   So I don't know which one was the problem.  However, at least for a half hour, this has now CURED a problem that had been occuring every few seconds.   

PS.  As a sidenote, before the severe USB not recognized failures struck yesterday, for a couple days I had a rare prodromal problem I've seen a few times in 5 years, where MS Word would vibrate and act weird in one monitor but not the other.   After a couple days of that "minor" glitch, things went kaput as described above.