Lenovo docking station to monitor

FrasierCrane

Have a Lenovo ThinkPad t460s and a docking station. I want to connect it to a monitor via the docking station. I've tried using a VGA cable but it won't detect the monitor. Presumably because the laptop doesn't is vga output. What's the best cable to connect to the monitor from the dock. The laptop has HDMI and mini port outputs and the docking station has display port and DVI-D.

quaidox

we have lenovo laptops in work that don't have onboard vga ports on them, yet we connect monitors to the vga port on the dock that the laptops are docked in to and they display just fine, so it sounds to me like you may have a faulty dock, one thing to check that always catches out folk in my work is the power supply to the dock has come apart in the middle and the dock has no power going to it, that is why the display doesn't work...

FrasierCrane

quaidox wrote: »

we have lenovo laptops in work that don't have onboard vga ports on them, yet we connect monitors to the vga port on the dock that the laptops are docked in to and they display just fine, so it sounds to me like you may have a faulty dock, one thing to check that always catches out folk in my work is the power supply to the dock has come apart in the middle and the dock has no power going to it, that is why the display doesn't work...

Thanks. Power is definitely going to the dock as I checked that. The description of the dock states "1x VGA without driver" so I think this might be the issue. Just not sure which other cable I need to buy to hook it up correctly.

BionicRasher

Post a picture of the connections on the docking station and the monitor
We have been using Thinkpads in work going all the way back to the T30 we are now in a T490
There’s been a multitude of different connections so it’s hard to figure it out unless we see the connections

FrasierCrane

BionicRasher wrote: »

Post a picture of the connections on the docking station and the monitor
We have been using Thinkpads in work going all the way back to the T30 we are now in a T490
There’s been a multitude of different connections so it’s hard to figure it out unless we see the connections

Photos attached. Think this link might also provide some information for me. https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/ae/en/solutions/pd029622#Pro%20Dock

jhud

So these are steps if you can confirm these


1 Have you the power connected to the right of the network cable port on the dock.

2 Check that the power supply is 90w and up.

3 Device manager under display adaptors Intel and not microsoft if microsoft install the intel driver for your device off Lenovo website

smuggler.ie

See page 91(75)
BIOS > Advanced config > Display > Shared display priority > HDMI vs Display on dock

Mr_Muffin

Hit a couple of issues with the Lenovo docking station on a T580.

First one was the BIOS setting (as mentioned in the post above).

The second was due to upgrading to Fedora 33 from 32. I can't remember what the exact issue was, but I had to remove a config param in a file to get the external monitors to work (took me some Googling to figure this out).

FrasierCrane

Went to look at it again this evening at it as soon as I docked it the monitor worked straight away with a VGA cable. I did update the driver yesterday so maybe a restart did the trick even though I was sure I did that yesterday.

Anyway, thanks for all the advice.

quaidox

good stuff, thanks for the update