Docking station Success...mostly

[treydur]

Per my previous post this morning. I really need a docking station solution as I run a number of periphreals that are important to my business, but need the mobility of being able to take the unit with me

I had fits getting this to work as decribed. I went through endless troubles and read everthing in every help forum I could find, including the guys with the T60's having similar issues.

I have the Z61T 9440-D9u and docking station 2503-10U. I decided to use an unused PCI-e Radeon X550 silent (heatsink, no fan) card from old media center PC for my video card. This is actually a Gigabyte GV-RX55256D with DVI and VGA.

I am running windows XP pro with all updates and have updated all Lenovo software via System update 3. Have manually ensured I do have latest updates available in most instances also.

Presentation Director, which is how I had wanted to manage this, simply will not load and I have opened another thread for this issue.

I was initially facing the same issues many were with sytem simply refusing to boot at all on dock with add in video card. I tried all fixes and make sure I had the the Lenovo Intel drivers as well as Gigabytes latest official drivers for this version card.

I was getting blue screen no matter which way I configured Display in BIOS (latest also) before I could get into windows at all.

I had given up, but decided this morning to give it one more shot before returning docking station. I decided to download latest drivers from ATI directly and extracted them, rebooted/docked w. BIOS display setting as Thinkpad as primary display device and then LCD+DVI out as options.

To my surprise, when I rebooted, it still booted with DVI (Samsung 940BW) showing boot sequence. Then everything went black, but machine did not appear to crash, so at what I guessed was appropriate time, i 'scanned' my finger and I could tell it booted, I then hit FN+F7 and sure enough, LCD came right up. When the found new hardware wizard opened, I pointed both Radeon's to the newely extracted drivers, which installed immediately and without issue. I was then able after trial and error and to go intel graphics properties and select --> output to--> extended desktoip --> Notebook + Digital Display

I then went back into windows display properties and set both monitors to 1440 x900 (which is the max on my unit) and voila. Perfect clarity on both LCD's, just the way I wanted

However, FN+F7 does nothing now, Presentation Directors won't load. I am able to get system to eject, but only (after massive trial and error) by disabling Radeon X550 primary and secondary in hardware device manager. I can now dock and undock and can even force same arrangement to bring up 3rd monitor (however, it will only run any two at any time) I use FN + F9, which originally failed because it was unable to stop the radeon 'cards', now fixed apparently by disabling them

Why this works with Radeon's disabled is a mystery to me. Unless it truely just passed through GPU to docking station. One other bizarre thing is that I have 9 monitors listed under 'Monitors' in Device manager. I had thought by uninstalling all of them and hitting 'scan for hardware changes', this would force the release of some, but it just finds them all again. Which further supports my theory that the software just translates/passes the GPU functionality from Plug in Play monitor and Radeon to Intel GPU somehow

So I have two default monitors, two generic television, two Synchmaster 940BW's and two ea ThinkPad Display 1440x900, as well as one mysterious Plug and Play Monitor (which I suspect is the VGA out port on my Laptop)

Anyway, I hope this helps anyone else save themselves the hours of brain damage I went through. Or if you were smarter than me and already knew how. Congrats, next time write us a 'How To' FAQ please



ps. next up..how to get all three monitors running at once and/or fixing Presentation Director. One and the same ?