Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Well, with it's USB 3.0 connectivity, and all the touting about the relatively decent graphics performance, I was very much looking forward to this for use on my ASUS Zenbook UX31A with a 3rd generation Intel I5 processor (which as I said, has USB 3.0 Super speed ports). This was connected to a 24" Samsung display at 1080p resolution. The good: - Well made and balanced - stays upright pretty easily - I do appreciate how Plugable uses the Displaylink drivers directly - always gives you the latest version of it - Drivers installed flawlessly and without a reboot The not so good: - There is still noticeable lag in the mouse and keyboard actions - Dragging things like Windows around your desktop also cause lag, along with tearing of the image. A big bump in CPU use is also noted when this happens - Youtube drops many, many frames in 720p, and there is compression applied For regular Excel, and Word, this may prove ideal, but I think I will return the device, and make do with a regular USB 3.0 dock with a USB sound card, and Ethernet adapter, with the penalty of having to plug one additional thing in every time (the HDMI port on my laptop). It's just the laws of computing (cramming 1080p video bandwidth down a USB pipe) that is the limitation. UPDATE 10/3/2012 I received an email from Plugable after they had read my review and suggested one key change: That I enable Aero desktop in Windows. Apparently non-Aero Windows (such as the Windows Classic theme I was using) are not accelerated by the GPU and instead are rendered by the CPU. After doing this, the lag and compression artifacts decreased significantly - almost to imperceptible levels, and large spikes in CPU were no longer present. I was also able to watch Youtube videos without dropped frames in HD. I am awarding two additional stars, one that represents the performance of the product, and the other for the excellent, and unprompted customer service that Plugable provides. I also failed to mention that I had a 3TB USB 3.0 hard drive plugged in to the device as well, with no noticeable issues or performance hit.