Lenovo mini dock/plus woes; breaks easily?

had this happen on a regular minidock a few months ago and chalked it up to user error. now it happened today on the minidock plus and there was nothing overly forceful happening. there is a little piece of plastic that connects to another piece on a spring that allows the machine to dock. it seems to be a very weak component. see the pic
Link to picture
Im coming from using over 100 HP docks in our company for over 4 years and never having "break" physically (one out of 100 the power failed on i believe). now ive had 2 out of 25 docks break in the same manner in the course of 5 months. these docks seem cheap, not to mention they dont even lock onto the monitor stands so it acts as a single unit like HP and dell do. i attribute this also to this sort of failure; when the dock is locked to the stand and has an LCD on it, it weighs it down well and if you go to pick up the machine and dont have the release button pressed well enough it would stick instead of picking up both the laptop and dock which seems like the sort of "abuse" that could accelerate this sort of issue.
anyone else seeing this type of failures in their environments?
thanks,
-trekuhl
Moderator note; picture(s) totalling >50K converted to link(s) Forum Rules
trekuhl

bumpity bump?
trekuhl

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I need to purchase a new Lenovo laptop in urgent.
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Hi
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Greetings!
I am most probably not the first one who is interested, but I failed to find the same topic in the forum.
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Excellent, thank you!

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I have purchased the Thinkpad Advanced Mini Dock Plus for my T410 but have a couple of concerns that I wonder if people have experience with:
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The T410 uses Series 3 docks. Per the tabook, any of these are compatible:
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I don't work for Lenovo. I'm a crazy volunteer!

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I'm interested in the new T520.
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Maximum Multiple Monitors with ThinkPad Mini Dock Plus Series 3 - 170W (4338-30U)

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Depending on which ThinkPad you got, you can get 3 screens up and working (the W530 i tested could drive 4 external + 1 internal without using things like DP splitter or USB display adapter).
Regards,
Jin Li
May this year, be the year of 'DO'!
I am a volunteer, and not a paid staff of Lenovo or Microsoft

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Thinkpad mini dock plus

Would the always on feature on the usb port of my t420s still work (always on) through a thinkpad mini dock?
Thanks

the Always on Port is the yellow port on the laptop itself, the dock doesn't have these 'always on usb ports'.
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May this year, be the year of 'DO'!
I am a volunteer, and not a paid staff of Lenovo or Microsoft

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hey kappelgaard,
welcome to the forums.
i'm guessing that your unit will wake from sleep if it is not connected to the docking station ?
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Hi Community,
I just got my new T430S and the MiniDock Plus. On the website I've ordered the combination I had the impression that I could use two external screens and the internal screen at once.
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May this year, be the year of 'DO'!
I am a volunteer, and not a paid staff of Lenovo or Microsoft

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There are similar issues with WD HDDs during boot, look at http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-won-t-boot-when-docked-in-mini-dock/td-p/... Unfortunately, there is no solution at this moment. I'd like to know whether it was properly reported as an issue or at least if there is some progress in resolving it, but it seems the only thing we can do is hope it will be resolved in the next BIOS/UEFI release. By the way, do you use BIOS or UEFI? When I was using BIOS, the issue was exactly the same as you describe. Then I moved to UEFI and now it doesn't freeze on Think screen, but tries to load the OS and during that process it fails and reboots.
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Lenovo mini dock/plus woes; breaks easily?

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