Thinkpads Forum

I have read on this forum, and experienced first hand the impact intereference from the power brick has on the vga connection to my external monitor when I use the dock.

My monitor is a 60hz and I guess the brick is near the same when power is drawn at load, so I get waves on my external LCD screen.

This only happens with the dock, which is not suprising given the location of the AC and VGA connections.

What I propose as a solution, and why I have created this topic, is to remove the guard on the dock that prevents using the AC connection on the laptop itself. It makes sense that it is there since it prevents someone from plugging in two adapters to the same laptop, but because it is far away from the external vga port I hope that it won't interfere with the picture.

So plug the power right into the laptop for better picture quality.

Oh and I cannot change the refresh rate on my monitor, it is pretty much stuck at 1680x1050 @ 60 hz.

Simple question before I start. Can this work?

If you do that will the dock still have power?

edit: I missed your last sentence. I'd be willing to try if it were not for the whole damaging my dock thing.

Results:

Nothing blew up.

But nothing changed.

Dock got power fine, and everthing works, but there is still interference.

There are two work around I have found. If you cannot increase your screen refresh rate, use one of the lower power profiles. The power draw of the L2400 @ 980 mhz seems to be low enough as to not effect the vga port. Another work around is to unplug the x60s, even at full performance no interference will occur, though there are obvious downsides.

Beyond those I cannot see any other solutions, other than to undock the system and use the vga port on the x60s.