Great when you need to press CTRL+ALT+Delete to break a machine out of an infinite processing loop, not so great when it fails to talk to an IO device like ye olde skippy DVD or damaged floppy (default timeout is 300 seconds per issue), but at least a good indication of an IO failure. I recalled from my college days about the two type of images a CPU can run being either compute-bound or IO-bound, and that by design in VaxVMS and later on WindowsNT (Thanks Dave Cutler) the CPU scheduler always promotes IO operations over compute bound ones. This clued me into this being a device driver issue since this generally only happens if the OS is either stuck in earnest, or if it's waiting on an IO operation to complete and eventually timing out. Another complaint was that restarting the machines took forever when the issue occurred. After confirming the keyboards and mice were working properly on a separate device or even upon reboot on the original device I concluded these were not the issue. We have external keyboards and mice on all our WD15s, and the chief complaint would be 'the keyboard and mouse aren't working'. The issue manifested more strongly for users who transitioned between locations and therefore docks multiple times a day. Glad they finally found a solution for this. From there is was a nightmare of Dell support escalation and countless driver combinations between laptop and dock. This would cause a drop in Skype audio because of the USB headset, but didn't not disconnect the Skype call. We were able to track this down when one of the help desk people found a user with a dock, but direct connected their ethernet cable. Had to get my SIP provider involved to prove it wasn't on their end, my SBC provider to show it wasn't their issue, and shipped GBs of logs to my switch provider to see if they could shed any light on this. It took a lot of work to figure out what was happening because it was so sporadic and the issue left almost no trace in event viewer. Random network drops which would disconnect calls, but not log out Skype. I worked in a call center and they just wreaked havoc with Skype. I battled with these stupid things for almost a year before we completely dropped them. The VisionTek made the most sense for us. Interestingly, all 3 docks had zero bugs/issues found.
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