Hi - I’m new here and I have a couple of questions.
I’m using a USB3SDOCKHDV to run a couple of monitors off my laptop.
It works like a charm. Then the processor warms up, and the fan kicks in … I’m in a quiet office and the noise drives me nuts! Worse thing is that the fan can’t seem to get the temp down, so it just keeps on whirring away …
I checked CPU usage on TaskManager and I saw that the DisplayLinkUI.exe process (which I believe is also known as the DisplayLinkUI Sys-Tray Application) was being pretty greedy, so I took a chance and tried killing the process. Gone. Hurrah! No change to the behaviour of the dock or my monitors, but the processor cooled, the fan shut down, and silence fell. Great!
Next day, same thing happened (unsurprisingly) and I initiated the same remedy. All good - but I don’t want to have to muck about doing that every day of my life!
So, my two questions:
First off, do I actually lose anything significant by closing this exe file/process; I mean, what does it do that I could possibly miss if it were never to get started up in the first place?
How do I stop it from running automatically when I boot up?
Interesting reading about DisplayLinkUI at file.net. It indicates the program has to do with certain operations on multiple monitors. The site also says that certain malware is known to attempt to conceal itself with this filename.
In response to @[LucasT], and for anyone else who may be wondering, this is the profile of my system …
HP Pavilion 14-CE 14-CE3501na Series Laptop
Processor: Intel(R) Core™ i5-1035G4 CPU @ 1.10GHz
RAM: 8GB
OS: Windows 11 Home (ver. 23H2)
Installed display adaptors: StarTech.com USB3SDOCKHDV & Intel Iris Plus (drivers for both are up to date)
The dock is new - and has only last week been added into my system - so it is effectively a new setup (the software and drivers installed during the setup process (I think) came from the accompanying CD).
Thanks @divad27182 - from that article on file.net it would seem that (a) it’s not actually needed, (b) it may in some cases have behaviour that makes it appear to run some Trojan malware code, and (c) I can go right ahead and uninstall it with no worries about trashing anything.
Is that a reasonable summary?
Anyone linked to StarTech (or even DisplayLink) want to comment?
@divad27182 - Also … I think I saw somewhere that you can check the file size to determine if it’s a kosher form of the executable, or if it’s been ‘bloated’ by having additional (malicious) coding added to it. Is that right? I’ll try to find that info again and share a link …
Well, the file.net page does two list sizes, and a link to show 17 more sizes. I admit that the fact that one was 8.5 times the size of another worries me a bit. (Of course, this might be normal Windows bloat. ) On Windows 11, I would expect one of the larger sizes. Good luck.
After looking into this, the DisplayLinkUI Sys-Tray Application provides a system tray icon that can be used to quickly access Windows Sound or Display settings. These same settings are also accessible by going to your Start menu then opening the Settings application itself. The system tray icon offers an alternative way of getting to the settings and is not necessary for the DisplayLink drivers to function.
If you are concerned about the system tray icon affecting performance of your computer, you can disable it from running at startup using the following steps
1. Open the Start menu and click Settings.
2. Select Apps
3. Select Startup
4. Find the application to be removed from Startup, and slide the switch to Off.
There should be no concerns of the software being malware as long as it was installed from a trustful source, such as the driver CD included with the product, downloaded from our website or downloaded from DisplayLink’s own website.
I am not sure why this process may be causing your CPU to become this active and activate the fan. I have tested my own system and did not see any similar behavior. If you would want us to investigate this further with you, I would recommend reaching out to our Technical Support team here StarTech.com Support.
That’s what I would thought to have done, but the exe file (‘DisplayLinkUI’ does NOT appear in the start-up list.
As a short term work-around I have just tried renaming the exe file as ‘DISABLED_DisplayLinkUI’ so it can’t be called …
Hopefully that will fix it (i.e. stop it from running automatically), but any thoughts as to why it’s running from start-up despite not being in the list?
OK - so that worked - now the only DisplayLink processes shown in the Task Manager are the DisplayLinkManager and the DisplayUserAgent apps. Both of them look to be well-behaved - using zero processor resource:
) On Windows 11, I would expect one of the larger sizes. Good luck.
