Constantly Unable to Mirror

[rockinrob]

Can someone please help? I am forever having to uninstall/reinstall drivers in order to be able to mirror Lenovo laptops.

It will work for a week or two but then will stop mirroring and show only on the projector screen instead of on both the projector screen and laptop screen.

Extending works fine, PC screen only works fine, Second Screen only works fine, but Duplicate ...Nope ... This has been going on since Windows 10.

I have installed the Displaylink drivers using Windows 7 compatibility which will work for a while until it doesn't. I have uninstalled the graphic card drivers, rebooted and allowed the laptop to use generic drivers (as per instructions I found on Displaylink page) and that also works for a while until it doesn't.

Surely, it shouldn't be necessary to uninstall/reinstall drivers as often as I have found myself doing for the last 12 to 18 months or so?

[AlbanRampon]

Hello,

I don't have details of the machine but it sounds like you are using a machine before 5th generation Intel GPU. This is a known limitation which we analyzed in August 2016.
Old Intel graphics driver does not support cloning across graphics adapters because they were not made for Windows 10 and that feature was only made compulsory with Windows 10 (WDDM version).

What you might be doing is install a very old DisplayLink driver (below 8.0) which wasn't designed for Windows 10 Anniversary Update onwards. If that's the case, you are lucky there isn't a new Intel graphics driver as it could prevent your machine from booting.
In the old days, the DisplayLink driver was creating features not available on the platform, because we could. On newer versions of Windows 10, the driver doesn't have the adequate access rights on the machine to do so and we use the recently introduced native support for DisplayLink USB graphics in the OS. The OS uses the standard features delivered by the graphics card.
If you uninstall the Intel graphics driver to use the inbox Microsoft Basic Graphics Adapter driver, you would get the clone feature as well.

After a while, you probably have Windows Update kicking in and then you have the properly tested DisplayLink driver installed to your machine.

Microsoft stated that the solution to this problem is to get a primary graphics card driver which supports cloning across graphics adapters (so a Windows 10 compliant driver).
https://support.displaylink.com/know...rticles/938634

Kind regards,
Alban

[rockinrob]

Sorry for the delay in replying.

Computer details are:

Intel Core i7-3632QM CPU@2.2GHZ.

Intel HD Graphics 4000 driver version 10.18.10.4358

Displaylink Drivers are most recent, installed in compatibility mode for Win 7 as doing a straight install seems not to offer the duplication option.

Thanks.

[AlbanRampon]

Hello,

Then you are exactly in the case I described.
The Intel driver number should start with 20 to be able to properly support cloning across graphics adapters in Windows 10.
Intel stopped supporting your graphics card before Windows 10 started, so you won't get a proper driver.

Kind regards,
Alban

[rockinrob]

Seriously?

I didn't think the laptops were all that old.

Well, darn it.

Thanks for your help.

[AlbanRampon]

https://ark.intel.com/products/71670...o-3_20-GHz-BGA
Launched in Q3 of 2012.

The only technical ways would be for you to block graphics updates (DL, MS and Intel), which is far from appealing and revert to a known unsupported but working state.
These states are:
- DisplayLink driver from Windows 7 era which could cause issues if Intel were to update your graphics driver, but they're unlikely.
- Microsoft basic display adapter which supports cloning but not all resolutions and not with optimal performance.
- Use third party software which does screen cloning.

Kind regards,
Alban