Displays Flickering Black on Windows (w/ Hacky Fix)

[matthewsja]

Just posting this here in case it helps someone else that has been having a display flickering issue on Windows.

I have been using my display link docking station without any issues with my MacBook Air for several months. Once I switched out to use my Windows 11 laptop, I noticed that the screens would flicker black intermittently for 1 second. This only happened on my Windows laptop. After many weeks of frustration, I noticed that the flicker would only happen for me if there was nothing changing on the monitors that were going through the display link docking station. About 3 - 7 seconds of inactivity would cause the monitors to flicker. I'm not sure what would cause this issue, but, it is 100% reproduceable on my Windows laptop and never happens with my Mac. My simple fix was to go to my taskbar settings and enable "Show Seconds in System Tray Clock". This causes the displays to refresh at least every second and fixes my flicker issue. I'm not sure if this will help other people, but I wanted to share my "fix", as the issue was getting very irritating.

[rboerner]

Originally Posted by matthewsja

Just posting this here in case it helps someone else that has been having a display flickering issue on Windows.

I have been using my display link docking station without any issues with my MacBook Air for several months. Once I switched out to use my Windows 11 laptop, I noticed that the screens would flicker black intermittently for 1 second. This only happened on my Windows laptop. After many weeks of frustration, I noticed that the flicker would only happen for me if there was nothing changing on the monitors that were going through the display link docking station. About 3 - 7 seconds of inactivity would cause the monitors to flicker. I'm not sure what would cause this issue, but, it is 100% reproduceable on my Windows laptop and never happens with my Mac. My simple fix was to go to my taskbar settings and enable "Show Seconds in System Tray Clock". This causes the displays to refresh at least every second and fixes my flicker issue. I'm not sure if this will help other people, but I wanted to share my "fix", as the issue was getting very irritating.

Given your description of the behavior, if you have not already done so I would suggest making sure that you have the latest version of the Windows DisplayLink driver installed on your computer --> https://www.synaptics.com/products/d...nloads/windows

If that does not help (or if you have already done so), I would suggest reporting the issue to DisplayLink directly by following the process outlined here --> https://support.displaylink.com/know...to-displaylink