I have to admit, I am a fan of Bluetooth.  Mainly because it’s just about the only wireless standard that can be built into laptops and support everything from input devices to wireless headsets.  Wires are so 20th century and therefore are lame.  But, if you have a laptop that doesn’t have built-in Bluetooth, semi-awesomeness can be had with USB Bluetooth dongles.

In fact, some of you may even have a Bluetooth dongle from the XP days which won’t necessarily play nice with Vista.  Some features may work but others such as “Bluetooth stereo audio” may not.

If by some miracle that you manage to find the driver disc that came with the device, try to let Vista search for the drivers on the disc but do not launch in the installer.  That will lead to a world of pain and suffering unlike anything you have ever seen.

But only use the disc if Vista couldn’t find other drivers to install, if it did, skip using the disc but you still may find that not all features are working correctly.

For whatever reason, Vista doesn’t include the latest version of the WIDCOMM drivers/stack, call it what you will, it doesn’t have the most up to date version.  So you need to head on over to Broadcom and download the Bluetooth updater.

Launch the updater and make sure that your Bluetooth dongle is plugged in.  Let it do its thing and restart if it’s convenient.  You should now find that all features of your Bluetooth devices are working perfectly.

Of course, I don’t promise this will work for every single Bluetooth adapter on the planet but should work for most.  If it doesn’t then the other solution is to just buy a new Bluetooth adapter and move on.

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Entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 8:04 am under Tips, Uncategorized, Vista.  Print This Post

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