Docking Station Connectivity Issues

Question

Hi,

We are evaluating the Surface 3 Pro (i7, 512GB) in out office at the moment. 2 people including me have switched to the device. 

The surface tablets are used with the docking station, which are hooked our LAN. 

We are using several programs which need a open odbc connection to our companies server. I have therefore switched off the stand-by when not running on battery. Either way, multiple times a day the connection seems to be dropped. The connection to the server fails, websites fail to load. 

After a few minutes or flushing the DNS everything goes back to normal. 

The constant connection drops are effectively not allowing us to work properly. The ERP software we use needs quite some time to fire up, and we are loosing heaps of time with this. The surface tablets are the only PCs in our LAN having these connectivity problems. 

I checked multiple times that all available updates are installed while the devices were in the docking station. 

Any suggestions what is going wrong here?

Best Regards,

Fredrik Stipps

Answer 1

When we got our first couple docking stations, it turns out that one worked and one was bad--it kept dropping the connection and switching between wired and WiFi. I thought it was a WiFi issue, but after finding that the machine was working with the other dock, it quickly became obvious that the dock itself was the issue. After getting a replacement, the problems went away.

A couple things to check:

• Do you have WiFi enabled as well? You might try turning that off just for troubleshooting purposes.
• Do you have a USB Ethernet dongle? That might help narrow the issue as well.

If not the dock, maybe it's a networking issue, like running out of addresses in the DHCP pool?

Answer 2

Hi Fredrik,

Thank you very much for taking the time to reach out to the Surface Community! I am very sorry to hear that your Surface Pro 3 keeps dropping connection when it's in the docking station. I'll try my best to help get this issue resolved with you.

I appreciate your confirmation that all of the devices are up to date.

• Do you have the same problem when the devices are NOT in the docking station?
• How long have you seen this issue?
• Does it eventually regain the connection, or do you have to restart the DNS every time it drops connection?
• And to confirm, are your devices on enterprise accounts?

Hope to hear from you soon.