How to have two external monitors on X220?

Hi guys,

I have X220 docked on a minidoc. It has 1 VGA and 1 DisplayPort ports. I am using 1 VGA external monitor, however, when I try to add a second VGA monitor (using the VGA port on the laptop itself), I get nothing on that monitor.

Is there a way to have two VGA monitors connected to the X220?

Cheers

 

If you are using the ThinkPad Mini Dock Series 3 (4337-10U)[1] only 1 VGA port is available and only 2 of the 3 video ports can be used simultaneously.

[1] http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/pd008390

 

Hi, this is the dock that I am using: http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-0A33932-Thinkpad-X220-Ultrabase/dp/B004W9BGMQ

It only has 1xVGA and 1xDisplayPort.

Could I use those two at the same time? Would I then be able to have two screens? and in which case will my laptop go blank or could I potentially use the laptop screen to have three displays at once?

I have an onboard intel graphics card (i.e., no NVIDIA)

 

I believe it was Ivy Bridge and later that supported three screens, so you can do two external or one internal and one external, but not all three.

 

Could I then use a VGA to Display port to connect my other computer in that case? because there's no way I could use the VGA port on the docking station and VGA port on the laptop at the same time?

 

Yes, you can use both simultaneously. If your X220 have a discrete GPU (Nvidia) then you may use up to 4 simultaneous displays.
If not, only 2 displays will be available simultaneously: that means if you hook up both ports to external monitors the internal display (LCD) will be disabled.

No, because the VGA port of the dock is a passthrough port.