Consumer Reviews

I received the Dynadock last week and was instantly impressed with the look, as I thought it was much bigger, but it’s actually very compact and doesn’t take up any space at all. It was also pretty easy for me to set up, which is definitely a plus, since the older I get, the less patience I have for this kind of thing. Attached to the Dynadock, I have a 24″ wide screen LCD monitor, an Ethernet connection, an all-in-one printer, an iPhone USB charger, surround sound speakers and a wireless keyboard and mouse; along with a Dell Studio 1737 laptop using Vista Home Premium, 64 bit.

Upon set-up, everything worked perfectly with the exception of my speakers. For some reason, the speakers refused to emit sound when plugged into the Dynadock and were only functional when plugged directly into the laptop. After trying a few different things myself, I tried getting Toshiba tech support to help me, which brings me to the reason I didn’t give a rating of 5. Toshiba tech support is a nightmare! First of all, there is no immediate tech support for Dynadocks…you must go through laptop tech support and put in a request for a call back from a “Level 3-Advanced Support” rep, which I was told there are only 2 or 3 of, and they will get back to you within 48-72 hours…during business hours only! (8:30-4:30) Needless to say this is unacceptable and had I paid the full price Toshiba asks ($150) instead of the discounted Amazon price, the Dynadock would have been back in the box and on a UPS truck immediately! I absolutely HATE poor customer service! My logic is, if you require tech support, 90% of the time you need to be in front of the computer while receiving it, and unless you’ve purchased the Dynadock for use on your company’s computer, (which is unlikely) it’s probably for your home computer…which means, unless you work from home, you’re actually at work, outside of your house during the allotted trouble shooting hours! Duh! Fortunately for me, I don’t know how to take no for an answer and I called repeatedly until I was able to speak to a manager in customer claims support, who assured me that someone would get back to me between 7:30 & 8pm. So, after 4 days of waiting “patiently”, sure enough, a really nice Toshiba techie called me at 7:45pm EST when he was supposed to have been gone for the day at 7:30pm, (4:30pm PST…yes the 8:30-4:30 they quoted me was PST) and was able to provide a quick fix for the problem with the speakers. Basically changing the setting in the control panel – sounds menu to the speakers/usb option instead of what it was defaulted to. He also helped me to change a setting so I wouldn’t have to reboot and undock every time the computer goes into sleep mode.

All in all, I am now very happy with my Dynadock. No problems at all with the display at highest resolution, internet is super fast, speakers sound awesome, mouse, keyboard & printer are functional and fast and the best thing of all which is what I desired most…only two plugs to disconnect when I’m ready to go, the laptop charger and the cord connecting the laptop to the dock. For me and what I use it for, which is iTunes, music, pictures, web surfing, document production etc. (no games or movies…use my Plasma TV for that), it turned out to be a good purchase…now if Toshiba can just get their customer service/tech support together, it would be a GREAT purchase!

I felt compelled to leave my first review ever (despite being a weekly Amazon customer). This dock is AMAZING. I’m testing it with both a Dell Studio XPS 13 and their new Dell Latitude Z. Both are great notebooks, but without a docking station option (OK, the Z has a wireless docking station for the price of a car), that was a potential deal killer for the office.

Enter the Dynadock U. Installation was flawless and painless:

1) Downloaded and installed Windows 7 Beta driver from [...],
2) Plugged all devices into Dynalink (24″ 1920×1200 monitor, Bose surround speakers, Ethernet, iPhone USB dock),
3) Plugged Dynalink into laptop.

The device drivers all loaded successfully, and after a reboot, everything worked. Windows even remembered my external monitor placement and settings. Seriously, it just plain worked. I was amazed.

My experience so far? It’s the first USB dock that’ll drive my 1920×1200 DVI monitor. Now remember, EVERYTHING is going through a 480Mbs (max) USB port, so I expected hi definition digital video to be terrible. Not so at all! There IS noticable (millisecond) lag when you’re quickly dragging windows around the desktop, or during some desktop animations like minimizing windows, but absolutely NO hinderance to using standard Office/Internet apps. To my surprise I am able to watch DVDs and YouTube videos full screen on my external display, EVEN YouTube HD videos, with NO lag or skipping. I was shocked! I have NOT tried playing a graphics intensive game through it, nor have I tried streaming a 720p or 1080p movie file through it. At 1920×1200 I expect it would certainly choke at that point, but if you’re doing either of those things, just plug your monitor directly into your computer and problem solved. That’s not what the dock is for, especially at that resolution.

I’ve been streaming audio all day without a skip. On the Bose system, it does sound like I’m getting a little less bass when I hook it up analog, but sounds perfect when I use the digital (optical) audio out. The bass thing may be just me, I haven’t done extensive testing. UPDATE: it uses a different audio control panel, and once I found that and adjusted the equalizer, the bass is where it should be.

It looks great and the construction is solid, very stable sitting on its base even with numerous cables running out behind it. Undocking is a breeze: just click “Eject Dock” in the Windows Taskbar and 5-10 seconds later (depending on how many devices you have connected) you’re good to go. Reconnect the USB cable and everything fires back up the way it should.

I’ve read the other reviews here where some folks have experienced some quirky behavior. Not sure how much of that is older drivers, an older operating system, or an older PC. While I have certainly have not exhaustively tested ever possible device or scenario, I’ve tested every use I purchased it for, and it works beautifully.

Hope that helps! It’s the best universal USB dock I’ve ever tested… You won’t be disappointed!

Overall, I’m very satisfied with this product. Instead of having 6-7 cords I plug and unplug into my laptop every single time I take it with me, there’s just one. That’s incredibly convenient. Also, my laptop has just 3 USB ports, and the dock has 6, so I can keep all my devices plugged in all the time. And when I want to eject the dock, I don’t have to take care of them one by one… there’s a special icon for “undocking” which allows you to eject the whole dock.

There is one compatibility issue however. So right now on my laptop, I’m dual booting Windows Vista and Windows 7. I use 7 almost all the time, because it simply is much better than Vista. The one problem I’ve had with 7 though, is that I cannot install the video driver for this dock. (You see, to get the dock to work with your audio, video and network, you have to install a driver for each of them.) I’ve tried several times to install both the driver that came on the disc, and the latest one from the site. And every single time, my computer would crash, and I would not be able to restart 7 because some files were corrupt or something. I had to do a system restore every time. Eventually I gave up, and resorted to plugging my VGA cord in my laptop like I did before purchasing the dock. Not that big a deal though. I mean it’s understandable… Windows 7 hasn’t even been released yet, and nobody’s really had a chance to create drivers for it.

So that’s the one problem that I’ve had with this dock and Windows 7. Not sure if this is the case with Vista, because like I said, I don’t really use it. Let me note, however, that at one point after I installed the driver, I did have a few minutes with the monitor displaying, and everything worked great. I had a monitor, speakers, a mouse, a keyboard, an external hard drive, a TV tuner, a printer, and a network cable all plugged in, and everything worked fine… no lag at all.

I’d say if you’re looking for a dock, this is probably the best one out there. Has everything an average user could possibly need, and works fantastically. Well, almost…

EDIT: I have to mention, my monitor’s resolution is 1920×1200 and the dock had no problem displaying this the one time I got it to work. And like I said, even though I had like 7 different things going on over one USB cord, there was absolutely no lag. I feel like I have to mention this because I saw a few reviews which complained about it. So if it’s slow, it’s mostly likely your system, and not the dock.

I was very intrigued by the concept of the Video via USB aspect of this docking station. It’s handled via a technology from a company called DisplayLink (www.diskplaylink.com). I read the reviews on Amazon and other websites that said that the video was passable for office applications and such, but not for games. My main use for the device was for my laptop at home, which I use mainly for office applications, software development, and the occasional video.

When the device arrived it was well built and looked nice. I like that they provided the optional stand so that it can sit upright or on it’s side. I unboxed the docking station and proceeded to download the newest drivers and such from the Toshiba website (had to go to the DisplayLink site to get the video drivers as I’m using Vista 64-bit). Once everything was installed the docking station did work, but the video performance was just not nearly good enough for my tastes. If I took a window and moved it around the screen there was a noticable lag. If I was just typing you didn’t notice, but moving windows and selecting things with the mouse was quite stuttered.

I did a speed test with the ethernet cable plugged via the docking station using speedtest.net. The results were as good as the ethernet plugged directly into the laptop.

I connected the docking station to my speakers and they sounded good, except that there seemed to be some stuttering of the playback from time to time, usually when the system was pegged doing something. When I jacked the speakers into the laptop directly and applied the same load to the machine the stuttering did not occur, which leads me to believe the docking station just couldn’t handle it.

I went to youtube and played several videos, moving the window from my laptop to the monitor to see the differences. On the laptop it played without hiccup, but on the monitor it often appeared jumpy. The CPU would spike when I was watching the video on the monitor as well, which was the drivers compressing the signal to send across the USB to the monitor. The performance just isn’t there.

I never got to the point of connecting other USB devices to the unit.