Question Issues with wife's triple display laptop setup

[mikeymikec]

My wife has a work laptop, she works both in the main office and from home, and in both places she has a triple display setup (2 monitors + laptop screen, AFAIK all 1080p). The home monitors are connected via HDMI via a USB-C hub, I don't know about the monitor connections at her work.

Sometimes when she tries to use the setup at home, the other two screens don't come on despite reconnecting the USB-C hub.

I suspect the reason why she's having problems is that she leaves her apps open at the end of work, puts the laptop to sleep and takes it home, then connects stuff back up at home and resumes the computer. I have suggested to her before that she should shut down when she leaves work then connect stuff up at home and switch the laptop on, but I suspect her priorities revolve around convenience whereas mine revolve around ensuring that stuff works first time.

Has anyone here had similar issues and found a solution?

The laptop I think is an i5 raptor lake running Win11. Naturally for a work-provided laptop, she doesn't have admin access.

 

[Steltek]

One of my ex-coworkers used to sleep her work laptop before taking it home at end of day. She finally stopped doing it when her laptop woke up in the bag (ours were set to run regardless of whether the lid was open for reasons related to how we used them) and burned up. Her subsequent conversation with the area systems coordinator was not pleasant, as it was office policy NOT to do that. She was afraid at one point that they were going to make her pay for it. They ultimately didn't, but it was a close thing.

At my prior job, we used to have to move our laptops back and forth from our desks to the public front interview windows periodically during the day. The monitor hardware was always different between the desks and interview stations (the interview stations got whatever oddball hardware they could scrounge up, usually stuff left over from prior hardware upgrades), and it was always a crapshoot whether Windows would detect the hardware changes and let us use the two external monitors without totally restarting the machine.

We never found a solution that worked consistently 100% of the time, as Windows PnP hardware detection over external PCIe bridges apparently still sucks pretty badly. I can't personally say that for Win11, as I've never messed with it much, though as it still seems to have a lot of suckage I would expect that it isn't improved on that front either over Win 10 and earlier.

She might try powering up once she gets home, and either logging off and back on or shutting down and restarting Windows to try to flush the old USB-C dock configuration from Windows before plugging in the dock and then restarting.

Also, if her locked down configuration will let her do it, you could also try to scan for hardware changes in Device Manager before plugging in the home dock.