How to get Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse working with your PC

Apple makes some nice accessories for its line of MacBooks, Mac Pros, MacBook Pros and iMacs.  Wouldn’t it be nice if those accessories worked with your PC, you might be surprised to learn that most of them do, even if you can’t follow the included installation instructions.

If you go the USB route, Apple keyboards and mice will work with your PC but the wireless Bluetooth keyboard and mice require some extra work to function under Vista, since I’ve been able to repeat this under Vista several times and XP has been hit or miss, I do not promise these instructions to work with XP but you are encouraged to try.

Now then, I recently picked up the Apple wireless Bluetooth keyboard  and mouse to use with my PC laptop.  Apple does not advertise PC functionality with them nor would I expect it to do so.

But, you can get them working under Vista but you may have to set the devices up again each time you boot the PC.

First and foremost you must have either internal Bluetooth or a USB Bluetooth dongle installed in your computer.

You’ll have to set up each device one at a time, let’s start with the keyboard as there is only one difference in the instructions.

Go to the Control Panel and select Bluetooth Devices, the next screen you see will look like this…

Click Add.  Note that an easier way to get to the next section is to right click the Bluetooth icon in your system try and select “add a Bluetooth device.”

Whichever way you choose you should now be at the screen shown below…

Once here and assuming you have installed the batteries in the keyboard, power it on by following Apple’s instructions but stop there.

Click the box “My device is set up and ready to be found,” once again making sure that the keyboard is still powered on and did not “sleep.”  Click Next.

Leave things as they are and let the computer decide a passkey for you.  I did not try this with the choose your own method so I can’t speak for that and Apple does not provide any keys in the documentation.  Click Next.

You are basically done at this point, in the next window you will see a series of numbers, type these numbers using the Apple Bluetooth keyboard and press its “enter” key.  DO NOT use your old keyboard to perform this step.

After you have entered the sequence of numbers and pressed “enter,” Windows will begin installing device drivers for the keyboard and it should be ready to use in a few seconds.

To set up the mouse, in the Passkey box you will need to select “Let me choose my own passkey:” and type four zeroes in the box and click Next.  You cannot allow the setup to assign a key as there is no way to enter the key to the mouse.  All the other steps are the same.

If you have problems you can always go back and uninstall the device and start over but chances are if there are problems it is likely the device wasn’t listening for a connection, meaning it was either “sleeping” or not powered on properly.

It would be nice if Apple provided instructions on how to set up these accessories with Windows but I guess it isn’t interested in doing so but my question would be, why?

You may have to repeat the paring each time you boot Windows but I have not tested this extensively enough to know that this will always be the case.

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