Connecting two monitors to my Dell Inspiron 7472

Question

Hi, I have a laptop Dell Inspiron 7472 with only one HDMI port. it also has 2 USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and an Nvidia Geforce graphics (MX150 I think). I have been trying to connect a second external monitor that has VGA and HDMI output, is there any recommendation to achieve this, is it even possible with my laptop? what would you recommend?

jphughan · Answer

In addition to the above, another option would be wireless display technology such as with the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter, which plugs into the display’s HDMI input (plus a USB port for power) and then makes itself accessible via WiFi Direct. Your system will then be able to project to it wirelessly without you having to join the adapter to your WiFi network or having to disconnect your system from its normal WiFi in order to connect to the adapter. That’s the beauty of WiFi Direct. This might be convenient if you might want to project to that display without being physically attached to it, although I don’t know if the experience would be any better than DisplayLink adapters since I’ve only ever used either of these for basic productivity tasks, for which both work fine.

jphughan · Answer

Your only option with that system is to use a DisplayLink adapter. They plug into a regular USB port and give you a DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI, or VGA output. However, DisplayLink and other similar technologies that generate video output through regular USB ports have some drawbacks that I wrote up in the thread linked below, specifically the post marked as the answer. If your system had a USB-C port that supported video output, that would have an actual GPU output and the post below wouldn’t apply, but it doesn’t seem to. And the drawbacks may not be relevant to your use case, especially if the alternative is not having a second external display at all, but it’s good to know before you buy: https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware/Docking-Station-D6000-Very-Bad-Video-performance-for-gaming/td-p/6193369