They aren't, they never intended the E series to run XP. They only made it available in order to sell them to business customers, because no business customer would buy a computer with Vista and risk not being able to get drivers for all their legacy peripherals. Vista supports 'Hot Docking" XP doesn't.

Here's a copy of my reply to the question of why E series laptops don't create docked profiles. Enjoy!

The E series laptops don't create 'docked' profiles because they don't see a 'Docking Station ID', they only see a bunch of ports from a 'Port Replicator'. The D series laptops came with 'port replicators', but  they had 'Docking Station ID's' which were picked up by XP when they were 'Docked". I wish the engineers would communicate these differences to the marketing and support staff, so they could explain it to the customers and/or their support staff.

I don't need docking profiles. That was not my concern.

Would you please say something to the topic "write cache" regarding to external devices like usb-sticks or esata-drives? Vista does NOT support to transfer bits and bytes "over the air " if you undock your laptop while having pending writes to that device.

Thank you. :)

Well, I think a "soft undock button" would only be a convenient way to remove those external devices safely. So I have to use that option from the tray-bar myself.

Bye

So in 3 words, "This is Ridiculous!"  The company next to ours actually had a Dell tech come out on site, replace motherboards, the e-docks, etc. and NO LUCK.  They were not even aware of the issue, which frankly, speaks volumes to whether Dell is going to do anything about this.  At my company we are planning on returning equipment, minimally the E-port docks since they are basically useless unless of course you want to shut down every time you need to undock and re-dock. 

Apparently as mentioned in later posts, Windows 7 supports this.  It is not clear if Vista really does - initial reports say no.  Not that it matters, since most sane, well informed people did not load Vista.

This is clearly an oversight by Dell product roadmap and engineering teams.  It was clear to everyone that Windows XP was the preferred OS in corporate America.  Maybe Win 7 is the future, but until we fully validate it against our proprietary applications, it won't be anytime soon here.

The E-Dock needs a hardware ID so that Windows XP can create the dock profile....that is all.  Doubt Dell can do this with firmware.  It would have to be a product recall which face it, won't happen.

Very disappointing to say the least. 

Windows 7 does not "fix" this problem with undocking, and neither has version 20 of the bios..  Some educationed contributers have suggested this is not something that can be fixed with a BIOS patch BUT I DON"T KNOW that to be true so I will not comment on that issue.

Dell needs to find a way for all operating systems (win XP, Vista, Windows 7) to recognize at a minimum the e-dock plus, so that Dell Control Point can build profiles for dock and un-dock, and let windows undock functionality properly perpare our laptops to be undocked, and to recogonize the proper profile when we re hot dock them.

M

Almost 2 years now with these same problems, XP on an e6400 with E-port-plus... 

...and no solution(s) from Dell or Microsoft.

As far as I know, there is not an undocking function in XP Pro which works correctly with this (even if using registry tweak),
though if one disables the parallel port in XP and tweaks the NVidia settings a bit,
then hot-docking and hot-undocking are possible most of the time by simply pushing the mechanical e-port eject-like button, with monitors and USB interface devices (but not storage devices!) attached to the port.  For me this works 80-90% of the time, with an occasional graphics-driver issue (blue screen) after undocking and sometimes a lack of USB devices recognized upon docking.