Trying to diagnose USB problems on your laptop or PC
Trying to diagnose USB problems on your laptop or PC
Hey everyone, I've been battling with this problem for a while and I cant quite tetris it all together. Heres the general setup, I have a work laptop and a personal pc that both reside at the same desk. I want to switch between them as effortlessly as possible. For that I've figured out the following setup: (Picture attached explaining everything, hopefully it helps) Monitor 1: DP to PC and HDMI to Laptop. I switch between them with the little nipple on the back. Perfect. Monitor 2: HDMI into an HDMI Switch, one HDMI goes to PC the other goes into a USB-C Adapter (one of those things with a couple of usb ports and an HDMI port, bought it to use with the steam deck). And then a ugreen 4-port usb switch for my mouse, keyboard, headset. Laptop is an HP Elitebook 840 G8 with an i5-1145g7. All works perfectly on my PC. On my laptop however I have issues with the headset mic. I have a Steelseries Arctis 9 wireless headset that has a nice little usb-dongle thats plugged into the USB-Switch. If I plug in the headset dongle and one more device its all fine. The moment I have 3 devices it seems the last device connected stops working (for example if I plug in mouse and headset -> turn headset on and then connect keyboard, keyboard doesnt work). Everything works just fine on PC, or on the laptop IF I dont have the usb-c dongle with the 2nd monitor connected. If I leave everything connected when I turn my headset on the sound works but no mic until I unplug something else and restart the headset. Is it just an issue with not enough usb controllers/endpoints? The usb-c dongle is going into a USB4/Thunderbolt4 port, but I doubt that the dongle I have is in any way USB4 capable. The USB Switch is plugged into a USB 3.2 Gen 1 port. Any ideas? Should I look for a Thunderbolt4 capable dongle? Do you guys think that might help?
It has a 5v microusb input for power. I attempted to charge it recently, but it didn’t improve. When I connect another device, it doesn’t work—keyboard lights up but no input, headset plays but no mic, and the mouse fails completely. Removing the HDMI dongle restores functionality from the switch. This suggests using a TB4 HDMI cable or adapter might help, though I’m unsure about bandwidth sharing between ports.
Did you check out a KVM switch? They’re designed specifically for this kind of use. https://www.pcmag.com/picks/best-kvm-switches