Thank you, Microsoft, for breaking my bluetooth...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jason A. Ramsey
  • Start date Start date
J

Jason A. Ramsey

So, apparently, I'm doomed to a life without bluetooth unless I go
puchase myself a USB bluetooth dongle. I installed SP2 and discovered,
to my dismay, that my existing bluetooth stack no longer functioned.
After doing some quick googling, I saw that I was apparently supposed
to uninstall my existing bluetooth before I installed SP2 so that it
would properly recognize the card, install the new (and improved?)
native stack. So, I endured the 2 hour + uninstallation/reinstallation
procedure of SP2, this time without the Belkin bluetooth drivers/stack
installed. And now, my Belkin F8T002 PCMCIA bluetooth adapter is
detected as a...


PCI Serial Card

yay.

Reinstalling the Belkin drivers didn't work, but on the bright side, I
suppose it wouldn't be ALL bad to replace my card, as the GREEN light
on the danged thing has pretty much always annoyed me, but I would
definitely prefer NOT having to take up one of my precious USB slots
on my little Dell laptop AND having an enormously delicate appendage
sticking out of my system...

To try to figure out what I potentially could buy, I looked in the
bth.inf file to find what was supposedly supported and saw something
called a Dell Truemobile 350 Bluetooth module, but according to Dell,
that module doesn't actually exist. The only Bluetooth minipci module
Dell has ever made for their laptops is the Truemobile 300, and you
can't even buy that any more. So, what's a boy to do?
 
First off, I love the title :)

Second, here is a list of BT Recievers supported natively by SP2:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;841803

Finally, you can install whatever BT stack you want. You do not need to
stick with MS's BT Stack. I did not remove my BT Stack before upgrading
to SP2 and it is working just fine. I have an MS BT Transciever though,
so it may be different there. I would simply try removing the Belkin
Card, remove any record of it from the registry under
(HKLM\System\CCS\Enum\PCMCIA), reboot, and reinstall the device. It
should autodetect and ask to install or install for you. If worst comes
to worst, you can try a clean install of Windows (format and reinstall
everything, but don't forget to backup all of your data) ;)

Just a side note, you can usually pick up USB BT Dongles for under $10
if you wait for the right deal.
 
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