DisplayLink Forum - View Single Post - Gaming issue and problem with external hard drive

Chris Arnold · 01-17-2013, 11:35 PM

God that was painful! Alright, after struggling through for the last 3 days, I'm happy to say everything is working without glitches again. I really have no clue which driver I actually have, but according to the device manager it's 6.3.38103.0, and according to the uninstall programs list it's "product version: 6.3.38355.0"

Anyway, I could not get 7.1M0, 7.0, or 6.3 or whatever the final 6 version was from displaylink's site to work with my game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Ultimately, I ended up reloading the driver's directly from the disk that came with the hardware.

Currently, I'm running Nvidia driver 306.23, but it seems from other threads I've read 306.97 will also work. What I'm sure won't work, at least with DisplayLink installed, are the latest drivers: 310.90, and 310.70. When DisplayLink and the most current Nvidia driver's are installed on the same system, expect issues with internet explorer giving an error message after being closed, Google Chrome randomly hangs when a new internet address is entered until it's closed and restarted, desktop windows manager (DWM.exe) stops working over and over again unless it or aero overall is disabled. Lastly, when running dxdiag from the run window, it would immediately crash on the first attempt and alert to a problem with "Direct3D" on the second attempt.

With new DisplayLink drivers but old Nvidia drivers XCOM but likely other games too tend to freeze in full screen mode on a displaylink docking station. With the most current Nvidia drivers and any DisplayLink drivers, I couldn't get the game to work on any screen with or without the docking station.

That was all a bit of a nightmare for a less than proficient computer guy like me. Customer support all around (Nvidia, DisplayLink, and 2k games) didn't seem to have much of an idea as to what was going on with DisplayLink, and really only the 2nd 2k games tech that I spoke to was able to determine that it must have to do with the video card or the video driver itself. Once I reverted to the old driver, I could play the game again, but not through the docking station on my external monitor. Finally, reverting to the DisplayLink driver that came on the disk solved the external monitor problem. Sorry if some of that was repetitive/redundant, but I just spent 5-6 hours for 2 days in a row trying to fix this problem. So, hopefully it ends up saving someone some time diagnosing their own system's problem.

Thankfully, now that I'm done, I can get some rest. It's 01:30 am here in Germany. But hey, no hard feelings. At least I learned a ton!

01-17-2013, 11:35 PM	#6
Chris Arnold Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2013 Posts: 10	God that was painful! Alright, after struggling through for the last 3 days, I'm happy to say everything is working without glitches again. I really have no clue which driver I actually have, but according to the device manager it's 6.3.38103.0, and according to the uninstall programs list it's "product version: 6.3.38355.0" Anyway, I could not get 7.1M0, 7.0, or 6.3 or whatever the final 6 version was from displaylink's site to work with my game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Ultimately, I ended up reloading the driver's directly from the disk that came with the hardware. Currently, I'm running Nvidia driver 306.23, but it seems from other threads I've read 306.97 will also work. What I'm sure won't work, at least with DisplayLink installed, are the latest drivers: 310.90, and 310.70. When DisplayLink and the most current Nvidia driver's are installed on the same system, expect issues with internet explorer giving an error message after being closed, Google Chrome randomly hangs when a new internet address is entered until it's closed and restarted, desktop windows manager (DWM.exe) stops working over and over again unless it or aero overall is disabled. Lastly, when running dxdiag from the run window, it would immediately crash on the first attempt and alert to a problem with "Direct3D" on the second attempt. With new DisplayLink drivers but old Nvidia drivers XCOM but likely other games too tend to freeze in full screen mode on a displaylink docking station. With the most current Nvidia drivers and any DisplayLink drivers, I couldn't get the game to work on any screen with or without the docking station. That was all a bit of a nightmare for a less than proficient computer guy like me. Customer support all around (Nvidia, DisplayLink, and 2k games) didn't seem to have much of an idea as to what was going on with DisplayLink, and really only the 2nd 2k games tech that I spoke to was able to determine that it must have to do with the video card or the video driver itself. Once I reverted to the old driver, I could play the game again, but not through the docking station on my external monitor. Finally, reverting to the DisplayLink driver that came on the disk solved the external monitor problem. Sorry if some of that was repetitive/redundant, but I just spent 5-6 hours for 2 days in a row trying to fix this problem. So, hopefully it ends up saving someone some time diagnosing their own system's problem. Thankfully, now that I'm done, I can get some rest. It's 01:30 am here in Germany. But hey, no hard feelings. At least I learned a ton! Last edited by Chris Arnold; 01-17-2013 at 11:40 PM.