Episode VI: Return of the Microsoft Display Dock

Remember this little dude? He’s back!

I went through the phase of owning a Microsoft/Lumia 950 phone, it wasn’t a bad phone at all but it was let down with application support.  It was supplied with a Microsoft Display Dock (HD-500), which you could hook up to the Lumia Phone, a Wireless Keyboard and Mouse and start using it as a mini Win10 desktop on a full screen monitor.  Cool tech!  Sadly, as Microsoft failed to make an impact in the phone market we all pretty much moved to Android or iOS – which consigned the phone and the dock to storage.

My desk setup nowadays is a Lenovo P50 laptop/workstation connected to a couple of 24″ QHD Dell monitors via a Dell Universal Display Dock, it works well.  I was rummaging around a box of cables the other day and came across this old Microsoft dock and thought – this still looks like a pretty cool piece of tech, I wonder if this thing still has any uses?  I gave it power, hooked it up to an HDMI monitor, grabbed a Dell Latitude 7280 with a USB-C connector and connected up the dock – lo and behold, it works!

All of the technical specs for the Microsoft Display Dock say it’s compatible only with certain Lumia devices, but it seems it’s quite happy to function as a dock/port-replicator for modern Windows 10 devices too.  Windows 10 detects the dock correctly and provides you with the same output to a second 1920×1080 monitor as you’d expect (extend/duplicate), along with 3 extra USB ports.

So don’t throw away your little old friend just yet, give him a try with your Windows 10 laptop – he might be your desktop friend once again.  If nothing else just throw it in your laptop bag – it’s still cool to use as an extremely portable dock.