Windows display settings reset every time you dock?

Dock the laptop and it all goes sideways: monitors reshuffled, the wrong one primary, resolution or scaling off, windows piled onto one screen. Undock and it's different again. Here's what's actually happening and how to stop redoing it every day.

What resets, and why

Windows stores display preferences, arrangement, primary, resolution, scaling, against the exact set of monitors it can see, keyed to their hardware IDs. Docking presents a new combination of displays (or the same ones in a new order), so Windows treats it as an unknown setup and applies defaults instead of your carefully arranged layout. Open windows then get shoved onto whatever screen is still available, which is why everything lands on one monitor.

It's worse with docking stations, DisplayLink and USB-C docks, where the monitors can even come up in a different order at the same desk from one day to the next.

The fixes that don't stick

• Redoing Display settings each time, rearranging, setting primary, fixing scaling. Works until the next dock.
• "Remember window locations based on monitor connection" (Windows 11 → System → Display → Multiple displays). Helps a little with window positions, but only when the exact same displays return in the same way.
• GPU-vendor or registry profiles. Brittle, fiddly, and not something to roll out across a team of hot-deskers.

They all try to restore a saved state that's tied to specific hardware, and hot-desking keeps changing the hardware.

Re-apply your layout in one click

ScreenSwytch takes the opposite approach: instead of restoring a fragile profile, you re-apply your working layout on the spot. Dock, click On a Desk, tap the screen on your left, and it sets the order, primary and extend correctly, whatever this dock produced. It can even give you a gentle dock reminder so you sort your screens the moment you plug in. Same two seconds, any desk, every time.