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Pretty cool device, but not for laptop gamers

I have a TC1100 tablet PC which has a fairly small screen. The docking station that came with my tablet wasn’t the right one, but I didn’t give it a second thought because I never used the computer in a docking station environment. However, I have decided that I would like to set up my tablet with an extra LCD monitor that I have lying around. The docking station from HP is quite pricy, so I started searching and found the Targus universal docking station.

I read the other reviews about this product and went straight to the website to download the newest drivers instead of the using the drivers on the packaged CD. I installed the drivers BEFORE plugging in the docking station (this is required). Once the drivers were installed and the computer rebooted, I tried it out and . . .

was pleasently suprised. I am actually typing this review using the external monitor hooked up to the docking station. When starting programs and other things on the external monitor, there is a framerate drop, but once things get started and settled, the lag goes away.

I started up several different programs and was happy with the results until I opened a game that requires DirectX. It wouldn’t start, giving me an error that said my video card did not support this.

I suspect the problem that other people were having with this docking station stems from the bit rate associated with USB 1.0 vs. 2.0. A video setup on an older computer probably had a 33MHz bus speed running 16 bits or about 528 Mbps. USB 1.0 is a mere 10 Mbps and USB 2.0 is roughly 400 Mbps. I don’t know what the Targus docking station uses as far as bus speeds and bus width, but I would suspect the people that were having terrible lag were using USB 1.0.

Overall: This is a pretty cool and inovative device in that it can add a monitor and multiple ports to ANY laptop. There are some stipulations though. One is that you won’t be using the emulated monitor to play DirectX games (I suspect movies might have problems also). Office applications, web browsing, and any other non-graphics intensive applications will work just fine. Two is that you will definately want to have USB 2.0. Three is to download the drivers off the Targus website and skip the packaged CD.

In the end I will probably return this product and just get a port replicator without video. I will just plug in the the port replicator and the monitor, instead of just a port replicator. That way I can take advantage of my video card built into my laptop instead of emulating a lesser video card it.

Update (5/19/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen. I also found some auctions for this item here.

The featured review for this product, Targus ACP50US Universal Notebook Docking Station with Video Electronics, was written by Austin McElroy.

The average rating for this item is 2 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.