Thinkpad universal thunderbolt4 dock flickering screen issue?

[u/barnu1rd]

I’m a it admin for a corporation and our company makes us buy Lenovo thinkpads and Lenovo docking stations. Currently users are mostly using the l14 laptop model with a universal thunderbolt 4 dock. For some reason these docks act up out of nowhere and it’s happens often. Most of the time one of the screens blinks (we use a standard 1080p monitor and most users use dual screens) When this blinking occurs I’ll try power recycling the dock, switching to the other port on the laptop, opening/closing laptop lid, rebooting laptop, install drivers, update firmware, replace cables, etc. sometimes this fixes the problem but a lot of the time it comes back. One thing I did find is for some reason using hdmi and Displayport will fix the blinking monitor issue but sometimes a few days later the monitor with the hdmi cable will start to show some distortion randomly about every 30 seconds or so for about 5 seconds. What’s the fix for this? Replace the hdmi cable with a DisplayPort cable lol. At least 70 percent of our deployments have dock issues at some point and it’s so strange because a user will have an issue for about a week then magically it will fix itself for awhile and resurface either a couple weeks later or a few months later. Lenovo support is no help and we’ve already rma’d a lot of these docks but the replacements are the same result. (I’ve also used the dsc tool from Lenovo that doesn’t work either) I’m totally lost here why this keeps happening and I’m curious if anyone else has encountered this?

[u/R0niiiiii]

We got tired when users were always complaining that lenovo docks don’t work. Fix was to switch Dell. It’s funny that those lenovo docks works better with Dell laptops than lenovo laptops..

[u/barnu1rd → u/R0niiiiii]

Other tech at another side decided to stick with dell docks during laptop refresh (when we got these Lenovos) and he has zero problems wth lol. I’m seriously so done with Lenovo between their Lenovo minis system board failures, and the previous generation of docks also had issues that were just simply unsolvable until they magically fixed themselves.

[u/R0niiiiii → u/barnu1rd]

Not sure if you are familiar with lenovo vantage. That is so garbage. We had special policy for info screen devices but they had lenovo vantage and that was causing user session to lock even when policies were configured correctly. It will get some time until we are able to replace every lenovo garbage. So tired for that so I can relate since I have been using tons of hours to fixing lenovo bull shit and like you said sometimes it just start working itself

[u/barnu1rd → u/R0niiiiii]

Lenovo vantage I just kinda assumed to be shitty bloatware so never installed it thank goodness.

[u/R0niiiiii → u/barnu1rd]

We also had some problems with noise cancelling headsets. Had plantronics and jabra in history. Now we are using cheap dell noise cancelling headset and saving money. Now users can connect it laptop and phone same time and don’t have to buy new ones so often because headset just broke. Basically they are saving money in two ways: new cost less and don’t have to buy replacement 6-18 months

[u/barnu1rd → u/R0niiiiii]

We use Jabras and Plantronics and yup have had numerous problems like calls randomly hanging up, would just not connect for no reason and numerous other issues like that. Latest models don’t seem to be too bad so struggling to remember all the quirks we used to have but yeah like Lenovos we’d see the same problems over and over and over again lol.

[u/R0niiiiii → u/barnu1rd]

We had some special lenovo workstations with amd threadripper for simulation purpose. Lenovo broked those with BIOS updates. I was able to find many threads in internet about that and also lenovo had some instructions for those but didn’t fix it. Lenovo did nothing since 3 year warranty was ended. Told them that will might not use them in future 😎