I work from home on a work-issued Dell laptop, and never use my personal PC for work. My work laptop gets connected to a work-issued Dell docking station like this one:
When using the laptop, the Dell hub is required to power my two monitors – neither one would work if directly plugged into the laptop. Each morning, I unplug the monitors (HDMI and VGA monitor cables, as well as mouse and keyboard cables) from my personal PC and connect them to the Dell hub. Then after work I switch them all back out.
Is there a rig that would allow me to leave both monitors plugged in at all times, and simply swap one cable from the laptop to the home PC? Ideally I’d prefer to just flip a magic switch, but I’ll deal with swapping out one cable twice per day.
Yeah, you just need a dual monitor HDMI + VGA KVM switch. (Or DisplayPort + VGA, if that exists.) It’d probably be like $200 and probably won’t support HDMI 2.0 so you could have issues with a 4K monitor or 120Hz+ monitor.
When I faced this scenario, I was too cheap to spend $200 so I scarified one of the monitors and just run my laptop through HDMI and my PC through DisplayPort to the same monitor. I used a $10 USB switch to swap my mouse and keyboard around.
You actually already own that rig…it’s the docking station you have pictured. Your computer just needs a USB-C port. If it doesn’t have one, you MIGHT be able to add a PCI card (involves taking the computer apart) to add the port. This would allow you to simply unplug the docking station from your laptop and plug it into the computer.
Assuming you either have the port or could add it, I will tell you that you may or may not be happy with the performance, especially if you use the computer for gaming. The act of translating all of the data from the HDMI and VGA ports through one single USB port can cause some issues like lag or stuttering in video, or video getting out of sync with sound.
Assuming it isn’t that bad, and you have the ports required, then the last thing is compatibility of your home PC with that docking station. It SHOULD work, assuming it isn’t terribly ancient and has Windows 10, but I have seen reviews which mention issues with Dell-branded docking stations having problems working with even their own hardware, so it’s a bit of a crap shoot.
I’ll look that up, thanks. Both monitors are identical, and could theoretically both use HDMI cables, but the Dell hub has only one VGA port and one HDMI port.
That is a very interesting option, thanks! I’m about to order a new PC for my partner, which was to be spec’d identically, but I can have the seller add in that USB-C port, give my partner my PC, take the new one for myself, and give it a whirl. Currently I don’t play games at all so sounds like it’s worth a try. I appreciate this advice.
I am not sure that this is something that will help (because I’m not entirely sure I understand the equipment in use), but for the past year or two I’ve used two computers: a desktop and a laptop. The monitor for my desktop is 35", while my laptop has a 15" screen; you can prolly see why I like to use the big monitor even when I’m using the laptop. But I hated having to unplug & plug whenever I switched from one computer to the other; my solution was this switch:
That looks like a very useful device! I love the pushbutton on it – it’s my Magic Switch concept. The only trouble is I use two big monitors when working. But thanks; I’ll keep looking into it.
Or just add an adapter to the mix. It will make it slightly more involved than just swapping cables, but you could leave the adapter plugged in to the PC.
Probably will also have to install drivers for the Dell hub.
Here’s a cheaper and smaller 2-to-1 switch. You’d need two @$10, but still better than $30 for two switches. That other one is more than you need, since it’s a 3x1.
ETA: I didn’t notice that the first switch is only $8.
Or you just leave the laptop setup installed and used Remote Desktop to get to your home desktop, as long as you don’t use it for video or games. Run “mstsc.exe”.
(Don’t recall if this works with Windows home edition, I use Windows Pro.)
I have a very similar setup, although I haven’t really bothered using an additional monitor with my personal laptop.
My work laptop (Dell) is connected to two other monitors (as well as ethernet and a keyboard) through this: Dell 452-BCYT D6000 Universal Dock. It connects to the laptop through a USB-C cable.
My personal laptop is a MacBook Pro with USB-C ports and I just tested it and it seemed to work perfectly with the dock. So that’s your answer is you get a USB-C port on your other computer.
A long time ago I had an analogous situation in the office: a laptop and a beefy development desktop machine. For a while I used a KVM switch, which essentially takes in connections from two computers and switches them to plugged in peripherals such that you can press a button on the device to switch between active computers. Google for “KVM switch” to see some examples. It was mostly good enough but I did find the transition when switching to be less than smooth on occasion. Eventually I just relied on VSCode Remote and SSH terminal connections from the laptop.
RDS is a solution. I have used the (really excellent) Synergy software, which is effectively a software KVM
You can use one keyboard and mouse, and one clipboard across multiple machines. At the peak of my nerdy trying-to-impress-the-boss phase of my 20s, I was running a Windows machine with two monitors, a Mac and an Ubuntu box, all at the same time using one keyboard/mouse.
It used to be free/open source, but now it costs US$29. Search for “symless” who are the developers
I bought a licence simply for the ease of use when copying data from one laptop to another, and, I guess, as a gesture of thanks to the devs.
Edit: broke link to Symless dot com - else this message might be regarded as advertising.
