When I first connected my HP Spectre x13 ( 13-aw030) to my new LG 27UD88, I was wondering about a very annoying typing delay: Every keystroke took around one second to register, additional letters were just straight up deleted. Like, what the hell?! But the solution is rather simple.
The culprit: USB 3.1 and task priorization
Okay, so the LG Screen, connected through USB-C, uses almost the full bandwith provided by the USB-C port you have on your laptop. Due to internal limits, this external signal is processed first, and then, after that, the keyboard has it’s turn. This would not happen with Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbit/s bandwidth), but the LG 27UD88-W uses USB 3.1 which is limited at 10 Gbit/s. They use „DisplayPort over USB“, saturating the connection with 4k60.
Turns out, the HP Command Center program does some kind of trickery with the keyboard. You remember the webcam switch icon on-screen? Yup, this is managed by HP Command Center. When I first found out, I just closed every HP application in trial and error mode. But to make it easier for you, here’s the solution:
- disconnect your external screen, again.
- Go to your task manager (command, shift, escape)
- Kill HP command center, including every background task.
- Connect your external screen again.
- Enjoy!
You could even write a .bat script so that you only have to double-click the script, instead of opening the task manager all the time.
Potential trade-offs disabling HP Command Center
Well… I’m using my Spectre to the limit, running Throttle Stop all the time for video rendering and photo editing. I’m not completely sure, but closing the HP Command Center seems to affect performance a bit. Using performance mode as a standard, I can see a little worse performance in ThrottleStop. This could be because the Spectre is falling back to „normal“ operation mode instead of Performance, but I have not spent enough time to really settle this question.
You should be totally fine if you’re just surfing, using Outlook and normal office work!
HP Spectre Hardware Informations
HP Spectre X360 Convertible, 13″ 4k OLED Screen (late 2019 model)
BIOS: F.28-03/04/2021
Keyboard Revision: 87.74 (German layout)
CPU: Intel i7-1065G7