It keeps freezing my screens and/or blanking them. It lasts anywhere from 3-15 seconds and is increasing in frequency. It was doing this almost since day 1, 2 years ago but was far less frequent. It's gotten to the point that I'm ready to chuck the dock and the alienware into a lake.

Dell support is absolutely and completely worthless. I can't get past the auto bot and it keeps hanging up on me.

The only reason I spent the god awful amount of money they were charging for this piece of crap is because other docking stations I tried didn't have the juice to charge the laptop.


I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Dell's docking ports are horrible. We have them at my office and they all eventually do that very same thing. I had one during the pandemic also when we were WFH that did the same thing. Absolute trash.

I have the same issue from time to time, and recently it seems to have stopped. I noticed this after buying quality monitor cables and running the fix below when having issues. Also, make sure the firmware is up-to-date. Check your Office settings and see if you are running in compatibility mode, or optimize for appearance, then try the other setting than what's active.

I crawl under my desk at work 3 times per week to power cycle my Dell docking station. I don't have any suggestions.

I believe that's a USB3 dock which uses DisplayLink to route video over USB and then out via the dock's DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. Couple of suggestions:

- Install the latest DisplayLink driver from here: https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/downloads/windows

- You might consider moving up to a Thunderbolt dock. They generally work better and have higher speed connections for multiple large format displays than their USB counterparts, and also don't rely on DisplayLink.