Blank screens with Surface Pro 3

[paulwcoleman]

I have a DisplayLink pluggable USB dock that I use to connect my Surface Pro to three external monitors. This setup has been working flawlessly, however I just switched my Surface Pro for a Surface Pro 3 -- that's the only change in the setup -- and now the external monitors are blank. They are on, and if I take a screen capture they are "displaying" because in paint if I look at the screen capture there is content on it. If I plug the screen directly into the mini display port they do work. However they don't work over USB (either the USB 3.0 DVI adapter, the USB3 HDMI-DVI adapter, or the DVI port out on the pluggable hub).

Any suggestions?

[paulwcoleman]

And here is the screenshot, where you can see that the OS thinks the monitors are on and is sending a signal to them.

Screen 1 is my Surface
Screen 2 is connected via the display port and is showing the contents
Screens 3 and 4 are connected via the Pluggable 3.0 unit and the actual displays are black.

[paulwcoleman]

Followed these instructions and now everything works:

First, can you please make sure that the DisplayLink drivers are properly installed, please do so by following these steps:

1. Disconnect the adapter from the computer.

2. Run the DisplayLink Cleaner tool to completely uninstall existing DisplayLink Software:
http://displaylink.com/techsupport_f...ll_cleaner.zip

3. Download driver v7.6 M1 from the below link and follow the installation prompts.
http://www.displaylink.com/support/sla.php?fileid=119

4. Reboot the computer.

5. Replug the adapter to the computer. Allow several minutes for the driver to enumerate and for the firmware upgrade to complete.

[RPC_FL]

Originally Posted by paulwcoleman

Followed these instructions and now everything works:

First, can you please make sure that the DisplayLink drivers are properly installed, please do so by following these steps:

1. Disconnect the adapter from the computer.

2. Run the DisplayLink Cleaner tool to completely uninstall existing DisplayLink Software:
http://displaylink.com/techsupport_f...ll_cleaner.zip

3. Download driver v7.6 M1 from the below link and follow the installation prompts.
http://www.displaylink.com/support/sla.php?fileid=119

4. Reboot the computer.

5. Replug the adapter to the computer. Allow several minutes for the driver to enumerate and for the firmware upgrade to complete.

We deployed 2 of the Surface Pro 3's last week with 2 x Dell monitors, a Targus USB 3 docking station, and DisplayLink drivers DisplayLink_7.6M2 for each unit. Everything worked fine the whole week. However, this morning both users reported the monitors will not display.

Verified latest drivers, unplugged the dock, and shut down the Surface 3. When powered back on, the monitor attempts to wake up, but it is only a black screen (network and usb keyboard/mouse works fine on the dock). I plugged in my old Surface Pro 1 and the dock works fine with video.

We have a mix of Surface Pro's and 2's on our corporate network with the same setup and no issues. I believe there is an issue with the Surface 3 drivers and/or the DisplayLink video drivers that is not present on the Surface / Surface 2's.

Thanks,
Nathan

[rmmcgr]

Another SP3 with blank screen issue.

All windows updates applied, and I have gone through the uninstall, clean, reinstall process with the displaylink software to no avail.

Used the support tool to gather system information to send to display link, however on the final step to submit this the website returns an error....

Any other ideas/tricks to try.

Very odd how it was working perfectly for days and then suddenly stops...

[petridish]

I have a Surface Pro 3 and am also experiencing the exact same problem. I have three monitors connected to a Anker USB 3.0 docking station and sometimes they work and sometimes they think their working but only show a black screen.

That being said, I have found a way to fix the problem temporarily 100% of the time: system restore.

If you use system restore to go back to any restore point, the display link monitors will work. However, in a couple unplug/replugs they will go back to not working.

Hope we can find a way to fix this annoying problem.
William

[rmmcgr]

An update from me: I rolled back the driver to 7.6M2 and have the monitor connected via DisplayLink working again.

Between uninstalling the latest driver and installing 7.6M2 I also ran the DisplayLink clean tool.

It would be great if DisplayLink could please advise what they are doing to resolve this problem.

In all other respects I had a SP3 that had all the latest Microsoft drivers, firmware, updates and patches applied.

Also, I noticed the DL advice has been, in some cases, to update to the latest Intel graphics driver from the Intel site: however this fails as the SP3 has a modified driver from Microsoft so the vanilla Intel one is not correct.

[andrman]

I was away from my dock for most of this week, but I came back and also encountered this black screen issue. I followed the above recommendations of rolling back to 7.6M2 and it's working again.

I noticed that there have been two Surface hardware updates/firmware updates released by Microsoft, most recently on 10/29. Could this be something to do with it?

[petridish]

I know, seriously. Is Display Link even reading this thread?

[big89e]

I had teh exact same issue but eventually got it fixed. Started two days ago when I plugged in after 10 days of not being attached to a dock. Tried uninstalling/reinstalling the 7.7M2 DisplayLink driver several times but that did not do the trick. Also tried with a differente Plugable device and a different dock and still didnt' fix it (basically i was able to trace it down to it being my Surface 3, not the dock, nor the specific displaylink device). I have 3 monitors, one through displayport, the other two through displaylink.

What did fix it was that i upgraded my Intel display driver. I was going to just uninstall/reinstall, then saw there was a new driver available. As soon as it finished installing, the monitors came back on. Been working for the past hour. The link below is where i found out about the new driver--apparently it's not available yet through windows update.

http://www.winbeta.org/news/surface-...nt-performance

. To install these on a surface pro 3 you need to download and extract the zip file from Intel.

https://downloadcenter.intel.c...

2. Then you need to go to your device manager (windows-x) and expand the "Display Adapters" and right click on "Intel HD graphics 5000" and choose "Update Driver Software"

3. Next select "Browse my computer for driver software"

4. Next select "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer"

5. Next select "Have disk"

6. Now browse to the extracted zip folder from intel (WIN64_15363) and go into the "Graphics" sub folder

7. Select kit64ib.inf and open it

8. Then select "Ok"

The driver should then install.

If the driver doesn't install or says it is up to date or something you will need to uninstall the old driver first (back before you choose to update the driver in step 2) and check the box to delete the driver files from the computer. I am not sure if this step is needed but I always delete my old drivers first so it might be.