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Surely I can remember how this worked
May. 1st, 2025 04:12 pm(This post is intended for entertainment purposes only. Advice is not required unless you're planning to come over to my house and solve the problem without me needing to snarl at you.)
So once upon a time, I had a monitor setup with a docking station that worked perfectly for both my work pc and my personal mac. (I am addicted to my three-screen solution.)
Then they pushed a system update to my work pc and it no longer played nicely with that docking station.
So I did some research on docking stations compatible with both pc and mac and ordered one that looked ideal. Worked perfectly with the mac. Still had problems with the pc.
So work gave me a docking station identical to the ones used on site. Worked perfectly with the pc. Mac wouldn't extend to both external monitors. But I could do a workaround: If I plugged one of the external monitors directly into the second USB-C slot on the mac, then I got all my displays. There was a minor annoyance that my fancy Snowball mic only works if it is also plugged directly into a mac USB-C slot. So when I'm recording, I can only have two monitors. And when I swap the mac into the desktop, I have to unplug one monitor from the dock and plug it directly into the mac. Every single time. But you do what you have to do.
Now that the work pc is out of the picture...victory! I can go back to the docking station that worked perfectly with the mac.
Except now it doesn't. It doesn't talk to the external monitors at all. I have a vague recollection that I went through a bunch of annoyance to get it to work initially, so I suspect that if I do enough research and tweak enough settings, I can get it to do the things I want it to do.
But not today. Today I do not have the patience for that. So it's a problem for future-Heather.
On the other hand, I can now ditch the keyboard and mouse that I needed for the pc and switch entirely to the wireless mac mouse and keyboard. As soon as the keyboard finished charging (given that I haven't used it in a couple years). I've been swapping out the wired mouse for the "magic mouse" when using the mac at the docking station because the action is different enough that it's worth the trouble, but it wasn't worth the trouble to keep swapping the keyboards.
It will, however, be a while before my hand remembers that the mouse now lives on the keyboard tray, rather than on the side table (because the pc mouse needed more space).
So once upon a time, I had a monitor setup with a docking station that worked perfectly for both my work pc and my personal mac. (I am addicted to my three-screen solution.)
Then they pushed a system update to my work pc and it no longer played nicely with that docking station.
So I did some research on docking stations compatible with both pc and mac and ordered one that looked ideal. Worked perfectly with the mac. Still had problems with the pc.
So work gave me a docking station identical to the ones used on site. Worked perfectly with the pc. Mac wouldn't extend to both external monitors. But I could do a workaround: If I plugged one of the external monitors directly into the second USB-C slot on the mac, then I got all my displays. There was a minor annoyance that my fancy Snowball mic only works if it is also plugged directly into a mac USB-C slot. So when I'm recording, I can only have two monitors. And when I swap the mac into the desktop, I have to unplug one monitor from the dock and plug it directly into the mac. Every single time. But you do what you have to do.
Now that the work pc is out of the picture...victory! I can go back to the docking station that worked perfectly with the mac.
Except now it doesn't. It doesn't talk to the external monitors at all. I have a vague recollection that I went through a bunch of annoyance to get it to work initially, so I suspect that if I do enough research and tweak enough settings, I can get it to do the things I want it to do.
But not today. Today I do not have the patience for that. So it's a problem for future-Heather.
On the other hand, I can now ditch the keyboard and mouse that I needed for the pc and switch entirely to the wireless mac mouse and keyboard. As soon as the keyboard finished charging (given that I haven't used it in a couple years). I've been swapping out the wired mouse for the "magic mouse" when using the mac at the docking station because the action is different enough that it's worth the trouble, but it wasn't worth the trouble to keep swapping the keyboards.
It will, however, be a while before my hand remembers that the mouse now lives on the keyboard tray, rather than on the side table (because the pc mouse needed more space).
