Thunderbolt 3 Dock G2 misbehaving a bit

[NickNik]

Hi everyone,

I am experiencing an issue with dock; actually, it seems to be issue with laptop when using the dock.

Laptop works fine with the dock, in general. However, if I turn laptop off (Windows 10 Fast Start disabled) and turn it back on, without disconnecting and reconnecting dock cable, my laptop will not detect dock correctly. It will start up by pressing power button on the dock, but will not see monitors and USB peripherals attached to the dock. It looks like as it sees dock as just a power supply, no smarts.

This will happen always, regardless if I turn laptop back on right after shut down, or the next day.

Likewise, disconnect/reconnect of dock cable always works, regardless if I do it right before I turn laptop on, or the previous day, right after turning laptop off. Or anywhere in between. As long as dock was disconnected and reconnected after laptop was shut down, this little procedure will deliver results. 

I have two docks, office and home office. One in office is a bit over 2 years old, one at home is 4 months old... definitely not the same batch. Laptop and both docks are fully patched. I am not sure when did the problem first happened; before pandemic, I was disconnecting laptop from the dock at office and bringing it home, most of the time. A year or so ago, however, I was leaving laptop connected to the dock in the office, for days, and never had a problem with starting it up the next day.

Somewhere in the meantime, something happened - an update, maybe? - that has caused this issue. Has anyone else observed it and found solution? While it is not big problem disconnecting and reconnecting dock, it feels a bit wasteful; I am mostly working from home, these days, and since laptop doesn't travel daily, I don't need to disconnect it every day, and am probably shorting connector/contacts life with these docking cable shenanigans. 

Thanks for reading,

Nick N.

[IAmRizen]

Sounds like you've done your due diligence, Nick. I got my docks in January. Since then there has been at least one firmware patch.  Is your firmware up?

[NickNik]

Hi IAmRizen,

I'm running HP Support Assistant and HP SoftPaq Download Manager once a month, give or take.

Laptop is on P80 Ver. 01.34, it should be latest.

Dock is on 1.0.62. 1 A 1., January 2020. I don't see anything newer for the dock itself.

However, just noticed... there is additional Thunderbolt 3 Firmware update for Elitebook X360 1030 G2, recent... July 2020... showing in SoftPaq but not in HPSA, interestingly. I'll give it a go.

Cheers,

Nick

[NickNik]

Sadly, not.

It is just minor routine update, no observed changes in behavior.