Comments on: Review: Kensington K33926US Universal Notebook Docking Station with VGA/DVI and Ethernet

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:29:00 +0000

I have had two Kensington video/USB docks. Both have been troublesome. Getting the display drivers set up required an elaborate process and had to be done in a very precise sequence. Kensington staff are very unhelpful – even when you can get through to them, they don’t really care, they don’t read the history, they repeat many times what you have already been told. When you finally establish what you already knew – which in my case was that the hardware was faulty, they just ignore you! Having asked for a supervisor to call me, nothing happened. All I got for days was “we have escalated the call” and “everything is fine”. ”We are a big company in the Netherlands, you are calling us from the UK in Germany and big companies have these problems”. This happened on both occasions that I had problems – the 1st time it was out of warranty and they had me on a wild goose chase with fixes that could never have worked (as I found out when I finally got through to a support person who knew what they were talking about). The 2nd time was within warranty, but after 10 days they had only managed to log the problem! They can take ages to answer the phone, you can only see your support query by logging onto their system, which requires a password and you can never speak to anyone senior. I only bought a Kensington again because I coudn’t find an alternative, but now I know they exist I would always buy something else.

By: Joel McLaughlin

Joel McLaughlin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:47:41 +0000

I think if all you are doing is surfing the web and spreadsheets you would be fine. However if you want this for gaming, that probably won’t work. As for resolution, it supported the full resolution of the monitor I was using. I believe it is 1280×1024 (not sure as I don’t use that monitor regularly).

By: Drack69

Drack69 — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:29:44 +0000

OK one thing I didn’t se mentioned is that you are running VGA through a USB port. This will cut down your video performance quite a bit. I believe the standard VGA port is 20 hertz and going over USB it will be like 10. For spread sheets and things like this it’s fine I guess but your resolution will not be as good.

My suggestion get a HDMI monitor and use that and just plug in a USB hub to give you more USB ports. It will only be one more thing to plug in. This is assuming your laptop has an HDMI port.

By: slemay

slemay — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:15:31 +0000

I take that back… I found the drivers at: http://us.kensington.com/html/12118.html

Came out in December.

By: slemay

slemay — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:11:05 +0000

Good review… did they give any ETA when they would update this (driver or firmware??) to work with Windows 7? It’s been 2 months now and I would have thought they would have done this by now.

By: Joel McLaughlin

Joel McLaughlin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:21:10 +0000

This is just for getting a secondary screen for doing work. I wouldn’t expect it to perform as well as a real graphics card. If you want something that performs well, you maybe better served by making sure your laptop can support 2 screens with the existing graphics card

As far as resolution, the dock supported the native resolution on the Dell monitor I used in the test. so 1280 x 1024 worked fine. I did have to hit the auto adjust function to make it look better, but once I did that I was satisfied with what I saw.

Display Link is a interesting technology and I will be excited to see what direction it goes.

By: juraj_bond

juraj_bond — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:38:09 +0000

I was playing in the past with a docking station from Targus, but apparently it was not able to drive my screen beyond 1024×768, and there was no graphic acceleration. Also, the overall performance was very sluggish, tasks as moving the window could take up to three seconds.
Were you able to max out the resolution up to the native of the LCD and have the acceleration functioning? (I see the 1280×1024 res on the screenshots, it’s just to make sure). Was the video performance just as ok as if you had the external monitor plugged in directly?
Thanks in advance!

By: gbmiii

gbmiii — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:38:54 +0000

gbmiii [ff] – Review: Kensington K33926US Universal Notebook Docking Station with VGA/DVI and Ethernet http://ow.ly/162FME

By: Joel McLaughlin

Joel McLaughlin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:37:10 +0000

Note: I tested with Windows 7 Drivers as well and it did not work.

By: st279

st279 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:32:39 +0000

DisplayLink drivers for Win7 are available which should work with this dock: they are on Windows Update or here: http://www.displaylink.com/downloads

The video portion of this device should also work on Mac using displaylinks standard Mac drivers.

By: breley

breley — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:00:05 +0000

The other big downside to such docks (I have the Toshiba DynaDock DVI) is that they don’t play video well through the USB port…too much data to push through USB. The Dynadock U10, newer than my version, does have Win 7 drivers, so hopefully Kensington will put some out soon as well.

By: mcgeneral

mcgeneral — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:38:54 +0000

gbmiii [ff] – Review: Kensington K33926US Universal Notebook Docking Station with VGA/DVI and Ethernet http://ow.ly/162FMD