Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Overall, I'm very satisfied with this product. Instead of having 6-7 cords I plug and unplug into my laptop every single time I take it with me, there's just one. That's incredibly convenient. Also, my laptop has just 3 USB ports, and the dock has 6, so I can keep all my devices plugged in all the time. And when I want to eject the dock, I don't have to take care of them one by one... there's a special icon for "undocking" which allows you to eject the whole dock.
There is one compatibility issue however. So right now on my laptop, I'm dual booting Windows Vista and Windows 7 RC. I use 7 RC almost all the time, because it simply is much better than Vista. The one problem I've had with 7 RC though, is that I cannot install the video driver for this dock. (You see, to get the dock to work with your audio, video and network, you have to install a driver for each of them.) I've tried several times to install both the driver that came on the disc, and the latest one from the site. And every single time, my computer would crash, and I would not be able to restart 7 RC because some files were corrupt or something. I had to do a system restore every time. Eventually I gave up, and resorted to plugging my VGA cord in my laptop like I did before purchasing the dock. Not that big a deal though. I mean it's understandable... Windows 7 hasn't even been released yet, and nobody's really had a chance to create drivers for it.
So that's the one problem that I've had with this dock and Windows 7. Not sure if this is the case with Vista, because like I said, I don't really use it. Let me note, however, that at one point after I installed the driver, I did have a few minutes with the monitor displaying, and everything worked great. I had a monitor, speakers, a mouse, a keyboard, an external hard drive, a TV tuner, a printer, and a network cable all plugged in, and everything worked fine... no lag at all.
I'd say if you're looking for a dock, this is probably the best one out there. Has everything an average user could possibly need, and works fantastically. Well, almost...EDIT: I have to mention, my monitor's resolution is 1920x1200 and the dock had no problem displaying this the one time I got it to work. And like I said, even though I had like 7 different things going on over one USB cord, there was absolutely no lag. I feel like I have to mention this because I saw a few reviews which complained about it. So if it's slow, it's mostly likely your system, and not the dock.UPDATE 3/16/2010: I have now been using this product for almost a year, and I am very happy with it. As I mentioned before, it allows for incredible freedom for laptop users. You can have all the hard drives and TV tuners and peripherals as you would with a desktop, and then something as easy as a single click, you could pick up your laptop and go.
I would like to mention that since I wrote this review, I have moved on to the final release of Windows 7 (Pro), and a new set of drivers have been released, and everything works great (including the video)! There are two minor problems I still see with the dock. First, although the video now works, it can be a little laggy when running full screen videos. It works fine when running YouTube sized videos and doing most other things, so it's not so bad. The second problem I see is that when you're undocking it, it can be a bit tricky because you may still have some applications hanging on to some of your peripherals, and you'll get a message telling you so, but it's hard to tell which ones. For example even after I close Media Center, it still has some background process running, which prevents me from unplugging my TV tuner. Anyways, the workaround for that is to just turn off your computer and unplug the dock.
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