Surface Dock w/ Surface Laptop 3 External Displays Blurry

Anonymous
2020-03-20T21:13:49+00:00

I'm at a loss on what to do about this Surface Dock with my Surface Laptop 3 and external monitors.  Every monitor I hook to the dock works for about 3 seconds and then goes blurry.

I've tried 4 different brands of monitors, purchasing two of the Surface mini display port to hdmi adapters, 4 different hdmi cables, and buying a second dock to try.  None of that made any difference.  I've even got a USB-C to HDMI adapter coming tomorrow to try, but I don't have high hopes at this point.  The Surface Laptop 3 and all of the accessories are brand new.

Anyone have any ideas to try?  I'm on mandatory work at home for who knows how long and it isn't fun to do all of my work on a 13.5" screen.  I'm about to just buy two new monitors because this small screen is giving me a massive headache, but I don't even know if they'll work correctly at this point...

Surface | Surface Laptop | Display and screen

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question. To protect privacy, user profiles for migrated questions are anonymized.

0 comments No comments
{count} votes

23 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
  1. Anonymous
    2020-03-21T17:18:43+00:00

    Hi Billy_S,

    Thank you for reaching out Microsoft Community. We're sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you.

    Please check this link https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4023496/surface-troubleshoot-connecting-to-a-second-screen for further troubleshooting. The link contains the information you need to extend Surface displays to external monitors. Please clear the display cache (See Solution # 5 for details) Once done, please make sure that the Surface dock's firmware is up-to-date. To check for firmware update, visit this link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4023478/surface-update-your-surface-dock

    If this helps, feel free to mark this post as an answer. Otherwise, don't hesitate to respond to this thread for further assistance.

    Kind Regards,

    Crest_Z

    0 comments No comments
  2. Anonymous
    2020-03-21T18:30:35+00:00

    I did everything there before spending hundreds of extra dollars trying to fix this problem...I'm about to just send all of this **** back and go with a different brand.

    I broke down and spent my own personal time digging and found this is a problem with the Surface Display Driver.  SurfaceOemPanel cannot be found and I can't find a way to install it correctly.

    Everything works fine until Windows is fully loaded.  After that SurfaceOemPanel tries to do whatever it is supposed to be doing.  Then it all goes fuzzy on external monitors and my surface screen blinks continually.  Every time it blinks (errors), an event is logged in the Event Viewer.

    If I completely remove the driver for Surface Panel Filter and make sure to check the box to delete the driver, external displays and the surface screen works as expected (at least displaying an image wise) upon a reboot.  It now detects the Surface screen as a Generic PnP Monitor.  However, plenty of features are now missing without that driver installed.  Installing it again restarts the SurfaceOemPanel event log errors within 60 seconds, causes external screens to become fuzzy again, and the surface screen itself to continually blink.

    So, this is a problem with the Surface and/or Windows itself.  If someone knows how to get SurfaceOemPanel installed, I suspect managing to install it manually and correctly "may" help.  And no, that worthless Surface Diagnostic Toolkit can't even detect the driver for the display isn't installed at all, much less fix anything.

    0 comments No comments
  3. Anonymous
    2020-03-22T00:47:59+00:00

    Thanks for the immediate response,Billy_S

    Will you be able to run the Surface device in Safe mode? If you can, I would like you to re-install all the necessary drivers back. See instructions below for details.

    Check this link to boot your Surface in Safe mode : 

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12376/windows-10-start-your-pc-in-safe-mode

    Once done, go to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4023482/surface-download-drivers-and-firmware. Choose  the right processor for your Surface Laptop 3 and select and download the first .msi file. Once done installing the drivers, kindly disconnect/reconnect your Surface device from and to the dock and check if this still gives you a blurry screen.

    It's also best to directly connect your Surface device to the external monitor so we can determine if the point of failure lies on the dock. If the issue still occurs even when directly connecting the Surface device to the external monitor, feel free to respond to this thread so I can have this concern raised for you.

    If this helps, feel free to mark this post as an answer. Otherwise, don't hesitate to respond to this thread for further assistance.

    Kind Regards,

    Crest_Z

    0 comments No comments
  4. Anonymous
    2020-03-22T01:46:54+00:00

    The same thing is happening to my Surface Pro 7 and the surface dock that I just bought 10 days ago in order to work from home. The first day worked fine, but then a couple of automated updates run and then the issue begun. I got some help from Microsoft support last night for almost 2 hours updating this and that (i am not tech savvy so I don't know really know what happened) and nothing worked. At the end their solution is to send a new surface dock, but I will get to me within a week! Today I bought a USB-c to HDMI to try plugging in the monitor directly to the surface and catch up with work, but the same thing happened monitor is very distorted and eventually just goes half black, half white. Does this mean the issue is with the actual surface? 

    I am also at a loss on what to do because as Billy_S said, working only with the small monitor is very difficult and not productive at all. Plus all the amount of money and time I invested on this is significant. Please help.

    0 comments No comments
  5. Anonymous
    2020-03-22T12:36:14+00:00

    The same thing is happening to my Surface Pro 7 and the surface dock that I just bought 10 days ago in order to work from home. The first day worked fine, but then a couple of automated updates run and then the issue begun. I got some help from Microsoft support last night for almost 2 hours updating this and that (i am not tech savvy so I don't know really know what happened) and nothing worked. At the end their solution is to send a new surface dock, but I will get to me within a week! Today I bought a USB-c to HDMI to try plugging in the monitor directly to the surface and catch up with work, but the same thing happened monitor is very distorted and eventually just goes half black, half white. Does this mean the issue is with the actual surface? 

    I am also at a loss on what to do because as Billy_S said, working only with the small monitor is very difficult and not productive at all. Plus all the amount of money and time I invested on this is significant. Please help.

    The new dock won't work, so I wouldn't wait around.  For me, I had a second one sent two-day shipping and it did the exact same thing.  I was able to try with multiple dock firmware versions too this way, all failed, so the hardware part of the dock likely isn't the issue.  My USB-C to HDMI delivery got delayed, so waiting until tomorrow on it.  With what you've said, it's very unlikely to do anything different, which is expected because this is a driver issue.

    It happening after updates makes perfect sense too.  It was several days before I got around to trying the dock, well after updates had been ran.  This driver isn't installing correctly and I found it was part of one of the updates.

    Anyways, I'm trying to reinstall in safe mode right now.  Maybe it will do something.  I put it off yesterday because it's a pain with bitlocker enabled...

    0 comments No comments