ThinkPad Port Replicator

I picked this thing up purely by accident. It’s not for me — it’s for some old ThinkPad X61s and the like at work.

Nothing to do with my own setup, but since I’m the one who sourced it, I figured I might as well give it a spin.

This thing is really just a USB hub + USB sound card + USB NIC + USB display adapter rolled into one. The first few are straightforward; the USB display is the weird one. The drivers are on Lenovo’s site, but since this is an old model, official support stops at Windows 7. Still, the Taobao seller handed me a driver from 2009 that somehow works on Win8 — the latest official version doesn’t. On Win10 you can install it, but the price is that your laptop screen goes permanently black.

It works the same way as those USB display adapters that used to be popular: not a real display, just framebuffer trickery to fake an extended monitor. The experience is pretty rough — barely usable, fine for reading web pages and documents.

It also works under Linux. The Arch Linux wiki lays out the steps in plenty of detail:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DisplayLink

I gave it a quick try. It puts out an image, but all I got was a single mouse cursor. Didn’t feel like messing with it further — partly because it’s not for me, partly because it’s a gigantic pain in the ass.

I do wonder whether the later USB 3.0 versions of this thing can actually do true plug-and-play on both Windows and Linux.