I have pair of Dell U2717D monitors connected to a Dell Precision 3571 laptop1. Both monitors are connected directly to the laptop: one via HDMI, the other via a USB-C-to-DP cable. Whenever the HDMI-connected monitor is turned on, it appears to disconnect and reconnect itself as if I had unplugged and re-plugged the HDMI cable.
I like to have my Windows Taskbar auto-hide, and also appear on both monitors, and I have the HDMI monitor set as my main display. This display-disconnecting behavior, whenever it occurs, causes the taskbar to exit auto-hide mode and pop up a "A toolbar is already hidden..." message as detailed here and in many other places across the web.2
As long as the monitor remains on or off, it appears normal in the Windows display settings, and it doesn't disconnect when it is turned OFF. Only when it is turned ON does this disconnection behavior occur.
The laptop has no other ports available that I could use to connect a display. Disabling DDC/CI on the monitor does not seem to have any effect. I have tried swapping which monitor is connected via which cable, and the issue persists so it does not seem to be related to the particular monitor. Setting the DP-connected monitor as the main display would not help, as DP-connected monitors will fully disconnect when turned off, which is an even more annoying situation.
Is this HDMI reconnection behavior a known issue, and is there any way to make it stop?
I could of course just never turn the monitors off, but I don't like leaving them on and would like to find an actual solution if there is one.
- Windows 11 Enterprise 23H2 22631.4751, Intel Iris Xe Graphics, NVIDIA T600 Laptop GPU
- This is the actual issue I'm wanting to solve, but everything I've found online has pointed to it being caused by main-display disconnections but not being solvable directly, so instead I'm looking to eliminate these disconnections as much as possible
