Surface Pro's, Go's and External Displays

[KJR]

Good afternoon

 

We're in the process of setting up staff members with Surfaces and whilst most of the switch over is going well, there is one slight issue.

 

We use Surface docks, so that teachers can effortlessly move from room to room with their Surface, plug in the dock connector and away they go. This works perfectly for peripherals such as keyboards and mice, however we've noticed a number of teachers having problems when duplicating their Surface's onto external screens.

 

The current set up is that rooms have a Surface dock, a monitor and an interactive board. The majority of teachers wish to duplicate their Surface screen to the other two displays. Devices are set to duplicate display.

 

However, this isn't always successful. It will instead do any of the following:

 

- It will duplicate the Surface display onto the monitor, but not the interactive board.

- It will duplicate the Surface display onto the interactive board, but not the monitor.

- It will duplicate the Surface display onto the monitor and turn the interactive board into an extended display (even though it's set as duplicate).

- And in rare cases (often after messing around with it for a while), duplicate the Surface display onto both the monitor and interactive board.

 

I've done some research and some people say that you can not duplicate to more than one display. I'm not sure of the authenticity of these claims, especially as we sometimes get it working!

 

As it stands, we have one teacher who is happily duplicating all three screens - but to be honest, I'm not sure how we got this working!

 

I would be hugely grateful if anyone can provide anything we could try, or if you have experienced a similar issue?

 

Thank you!

[DalekSec]

We have Surface Pro 4's and docks, and i hate them.

 

Make sure the docks firmware is up to date first off, i haven't managed to duplicate to 3 screens at once with the Surfaces via a dock. I can with my HP laptop via a USB-C dock but not the Surfaces.

 

Only 1 teacher wants it like this so havent looked too much at it, most have it as their desk screen is a duplicate of the projector and the surface screen is their own private one.

[Andrew_C]

One gotcha we've found is that they are very fussy on cables. Seem to work OK with £ching M$ cables. I wonder how they "fixed" that?

[KJR]

Make sure the docks firmware is up to date first off, i haven't managed to duplicate to 3 screens at once with the Surfaces via a dock. I can with my HP laptop via a USB-C dock but not the Surfaces.

 

Thank you, I have checked, and it appears that all of our Surface docks are running the latest firmware. We'll continue to investigate!

 

One gotcha we've found is that they are very fussy on cables. Seem to work OK with £ching M$ cables. I wonder how they "fixed" that?

 

Hmm.. interesting! We'll take a look at getting the official cables and see if this improves things!

[DalekSec]

Thank you, I have checked, and it appears that all of our Surface docks are running the latest firmware. We'll continue to investigate!

 

Just an FYI, the Surface Dock updater is a crock of -redacted-. You'd think it would automatically download the latest firmware when you used it, nope it downloads the latest at the time of downloading it from their website. So if you've been using the tool for 2 years and wondered why it's never been updated you know why! We did this for about 6 months till we realised we had to re-download the tool for the newer updates....

[AshleyNicholas]

Good afternoon

 

We're in the process of setting up staff members with Surfaces and whilst most of the switch over is going well, there is one slight issue.

 

We use Surface docks, so that teachers can effortlessly move from room to room with their Surface, plug in the dock connector and away they go. This works perfectly for peripherals such as keyboards and mice, however we've noticed a number of teachers having problems when duplicating their Surface's onto external screens.

 

The current set up is that rooms have a Surface dock, a monitor and an interactive board. The majority of teachers wish to duplicate their Surface screen to the other two displays. Devices are set to duplicate display.

 

However, this isn't always successful. It will instead do any of the following:

 

- It will duplicate the Surface display onto the monitor, but not the interactive board.

- It will duplicate the Surface display onto the interactive board, but not the monitor.

- It will duplicate the Surface display onto the monitor and turn the interactive board into an extended display (even though it's set as duplicate).

- And in rare cases (often after messing around with it for a while), duplicate the Surface display onto both the monitor and interactive board.

 

I've done some research and some people say that you can not duplicate to more than one display. I'm not sure of the authenticity of these claims, especially as we sometimes get it working!

 

As it stands, we have one teacher who is happily duplicating all three screens - but to be honest, I'm not sure how we got this working!

 

I would be hugely grateful if anyone can provide anything we could try, or if you have experienced a similar issue?

 

Thank you!

 

Make sure you are using Active 4K 1.2 DP Adapters.

We had the same Issue, even the Genuine Microsoft Adapters didn't work.