Thinkpads Forum

Recently bought a T61 (766417U) with an Advanced Dock (250310U).

I’ve never used a dock before, and I’m having a lot of problems docking/undocking my notebook.
I’m running (2) external monitors through the dock – (1) VGA and (1) DVI.

Whenever I try to dock my notebook (power-off/lid closed) and then powering up the unit with the power button on the dock; neither of my external monitors work (laptop screen does not work either if I open the lid).

The only way I seem to be able to get the dock to work, is to power up my laptop, wait for windows to fully load, and then with the lid still up, dock it.

The problem with this however is, if my laptop goes into standby/hibernation mode, and I “wake” it up, I end up having the same problem as before and both external screens (and even the notebook screen) will not work.

In addition to this, I can’t shutdown/restart while docked! The computer sits at the signoff screen saying “shutting down” and stays there.

I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but if anybody has any suggestions I would really appreciate it – as I’ve literally spent hours trying to rectify this issue.

You (should) have two profiles: docked and undocked. When you boot docked, Windows loads the Docked profile and knows about your monitor layout.

You should dock your computer, power up, and then get your displays right. After booting, right-click the desktop, select Properties, then Settings, and turn on your external displays. You may need to run CCC (Catalyst control center) to get your external VGA enabled rather than your internal display: right-click on the desktop and select ATI Catalyst Control Center, or click on the ATI icon in your traybar. From there, you can poke around to get it set up correctly.