I bought an Acer 12-in-1 USB-C dock (P/N HP.DSCAB.009) ~1 year ago. I have used it to connect two external monitors to my laptops. The laptops are all Windows Pro, one Windows 10, two Windows 11. I have connected the external monitors through either 2xHDMI or HDMI+DP. The external monitors are various DELL and ASUS products. Everything has worked well.
I decided I needed another one, so I bought one, it looks almost the same (it has the product details text etched into the cover while the first one has them printed on a white paper sticker attahced to the cover. Both of them have the exact same P/N and EAN codes and other text, there are no serial numbers, production dates or other unique identifiers to find on the outside of the product.
The newly bought one does not work like the old one on any of the computers, it refuses to display on two external monitors at the same time. It does not matter if they are connected by 2xHDMI or HDMI+DP, if the internal monitor is active or not, what refresh rate and resolution settings are used, whether using duplicate or extend mode in Windows or anything else we have tried in hours of troubleshooting. Windows always shows one of the external monitors as detected but "not active". If we try to set it to duplicate/extend mode it just immediately falls back to "not active". We have tried all combinations of ports/cables/monitors. If one of the external monitors is disconnected the other one works fine. It is the same on all three laptops.
If the newly bought dock is disconnected and replaced by the old one, everything immediately works as expected, on all the laptops, no issues at all.
Now we think that perhaps the newly bought one is just faulty and are thinking of returning it and trying with another one, but can we be sure that this is not something that has changed with the production and we will have the same issue again? Or is there something more that we should try in troubleshooting? There is very little support to find on the HP.DSCAB.009 on Acer site, like if there are different versions (with different capabilities to expect) in any way except the sticker/etched variations.
Working version:
Non-working version:
