Latitude E Series and E-Port Replicators

hi, did you find a resolve for this?

This sounds like a similar issue to the D series docks and latitudes.  On my D620 with matching dock running Vista, I would see the 1-2 second pause out of every 10 seconds.  that was actually more tolerable than the issue with the keyboard causing 1-2 second pauses every 10 seconds or so while typing, and occasionally skip a letter here or there.  I saw this posted time and time again in various forums, though didn't see a good explanation or permanent, proper fix. 

My analysis based on the behavior and years of experience dealing with all kinds of computer problems: some kind of issue with how USB port devices behave when connected through a hub.  I'm not sure if this is 100% true, though the port replicator seems to treat the extra ports on the back of the port replicator as a fancy, powered, USB Hub in respect to USB peripherals.  It seems that when you connect a mouse through a hub to the laptop, regardless of there being other devices connected as well, it introduces that annoying little lag.  What Dell needs to do to fix it? I don't know.  I do have two possible work arounds though.

First: try connecting your mouse through the side USB ports directly on your laptop, bypassing the dock completely.  This is how I used to connect my mouse and keyboard to my D620 while docked to avoid the lag issue.  The obvious problem with this, at least with the D620, it ONLY has 2 ports on the side.  This poses a problem when you want to connect other USB things like printers or flash drives.  Apparently the replicator handles those types of peripherals without any noticable issues, so I would plug mine there. 

The second possible fix:  what I ended up doing to free up 1 of my 2 precious side USB ports was get an old PS/2 style keyboard, the ones with the purple connectors.  My PS/2 ports seem to be unaffected by the USB mystery issue.  I would have used a PS/2 mouse as well, though I have a nice USB mouse I bought and really don't want to give it up for an old one.  I found by trial and error that the USB keyboard and mouse I have will not work in the PS/2 plugs with an adapter, it has to be an older style PS/2 device. 

Depending on your type of E series replicator from what I've seen on the site, you may or may not have PS/2 ports. 

I was hoping this problem was corrected with the E series since my company told me my laptop lease was ending and I get upgraded to an E6400 next week.  Seems I'll be dealing with this gremlin again if I decide to get a new dock.

Wathman,

Great info and insight on this.  I'll have to try putting the USB mouse on the laptop port instead of the dock.  No PS/2 ports available on these docks...otherwise that would be a great fix.

We've done some testing that seems to indicate this may be a problem with our LANdesk remote control mirror driver, although we haven't confirmed it yet.  I think it may also have something to do with the interface of the dock itself, and how Windows sees the dock...still investigating that avenue.

Thanks...

This sounds like something similar to what we saw with our D series notebooks as soon as we started using the Dell Quickset Software.  Basically what was happening is that the power management software was disabling the NIC.  So when the computer was docked and the network card was plugged in to the network, the mouse would freeze every time it tried to find the NIC.  We had to change the setting on this Dell Quickset software so that the NIC would not be turned off when running on batteries and this fixed the problem.

The fix, while it was happening though was this.

1. Open control panel->system

2. Open Device Manager and find the network card.  Remove it, then scan for hardware changes so that it gets re-installed.

3. Once that is complete, go back into the QuickSet power manager and change the setting so that the NIC doesn't get turned off when running on batteries.

Hope this helps your issue as this helped us out.