Surface Dock keeps disconnecting/reconnecting USB devices with Surface Book 2

i think i found what the problem is. The MS dock power supply simply does not provide enough power (90 W), it produces even less than the original Surface Book 2 power suppy (95 W for the Surface, 102 W including the USB).

To resolve the issue right now you have 3 practical options:

1. do not use your Surface Book 2, connected to the Surface Dock, in "best performance", but rather find the performance-power equilibrium that best adapt to your particular situation; i would begin by "best battery life" and try for some time and increase it a bit until it start to disconnect intermittently again.
2. Get the new Surface Dock 2. It's being announced with a 199 W power supply.
3. Get a more powerful power supply that fits in the dock.

as you read above there is no software update, configuration (other than power consumption), replacement, or other that will let you enjoy your dock and Surface Book together to the fullest

This is complete tosh, it has nothing to do with the microsoft dock what so ever.

I am currently sat here with the power supply that came with the laptop, plugged in directly to the laptop. But the external monitor I use which has a built in USB-C/TB3 hub suffers from the same issue everyone here is describing. I can go for 2 hours with no issues then for no apparent reason what so ever I am finding USB devices lose connections.

If you open device manager and just watch it, you will see it keeps changing as devices are lost/re-appear. It's like it is automagically "scans for new hardware". I can sit here for 30 minutes while it keep repeating itself. 

I sometimes even find that when I'm just using the laptop with no external devices, I can even lose my geforce graphics card, like it was taken out of the machine and no longer appears in device manager unless I scan for new hardware again.

It's just MS trash to be honest. It is by far the most unproductive system I've ever had to suffer with and is exactly why our organisation will never buy into Microsoft hardware again because we are losing money every day dealing with these problems across our entire work force.

i think i found what the problem is. The MS dock power supply simply does not provide enough power (90 W), it produces even less than the original Surface Book 2 power suppy (95 W for the Surface, 102 W including the USB).

To resolve the issue right now you have 3 practical options:

1. do not use your Surface Book 2, connected to the Surface Dock, in "best performance", but rather find the performance-power equilibrium that best adapt to your particular situation; i would begin by "best battery life" and try for some time and increase it a bit until it start to disconnect intermittently again.
2. Get the new Surface Dock 2. It's being announced with a 199 W power supply.
3. Get a more powerful power supply that fits in the dock.

as you read above there is no software update, configuration (other than power consumption), replacement, or other that will let you enjoy your dock and Surface Book together to the fullest

Reinstalling Nvidia and Intel USB hub drivers did not solve the problem since they were already up to date for me. Simply reinstalling them made no difference. 

What made things a bit better for me is to go to Device Manager -> USB controllers and find all the "Generic USB Hub devices"

For each of those devices, you want to check and see that on their "Details" page they have the hardware ID as VID = 045E (Microsoft) and PID =0901, 0902, etc... to make sure they are one of the USB hub ports on the Surface Dock.

For each of these devices, I went to their Power Management tab and unchecked the box that says "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power".

This seems to help because now I have fewer disconnections, but doesn't solve the problem entirely. I might have missed a root device or something else. 

The reason I'm looking in this area is because I noticed that the times when I'm seeing USB disconnecting seems to be when my Surface device is really stressed on performance, mostly when playing some games that has the CPU and GPU running near their limits, fan's going full blast and the computer's still getting warmer. It seems like when the system is thermal throttling, it decides to turn off power to the USB devices and disconnect your keyboard and mouse because as a side effect? What the hell. 

From this observation, I don't think spending money to buying a Surface Dock 2 would actually solve the problem if my suspicion is right -- this is a software configuration issue, not a hardware defect. Windows device drivers are being overly aggressive in trying to manage power and turned off devices that is detrimental to the user's experience.

Alex,

That would be awesome if you updated your results!  I plan on picking one up soon too.  I did a couple things to my system that may have helped -- I haven't seen the issue in the last couple days after doing this, so your results may vary.

First, I manually updated the GeForceGTX drivers.  I don't know if it is related, but since all the data (usb, ethernet, audio, graphics) is being sent over the surface connection, maybe the data is overwhelmed and it is crashing the dock firmware?  So I thought, why not give it a shot.  I went into Device Manager -> Display Adapters -> NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 -> Right-Click/Properties.  From here I clicked Update Drivers and specified "Search Automatically".  It found an update and installed it.  Like I said, I have no idea if this was the fix.  See here:

Second, I Uninstalled the "Intel(R) USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller - 1.0 (Microsoft)".  After, I did a scan for hardware changes and it re-installed the same drivers and all the USB devices on my computer.  It took a couple minutes for it to pick everything up again (mouse, keyboard, dock, etc).  See here:

After rebooting following both of these things, I haven't see the issue since!  I am knocking on wood as we speak as well ;)  If it comes back I'll edit my post...

Good luck!

Joe

Has anyone purchased the Surface Dock 2 and can confirm if this USB disconnection issue no longer occurs?

Not the best solution to pay over a couple hundred dollars to fix this issue, but if it resolves the issue ill buy it.