5The Bluetooth Guide

Wel­come to The Bluetooth Guide

This guide has blos­somed from a simple begin­ning to become the ‘net’s most extens­ive resource for Bluetooth help & inform­a­tion. Over 100 dif­fer­ent USB Dongles, PC Cards and laptop mod­els have now been suc­cess­fully setup with this guide. After fol­low­ing this guide you should be able to estab­lish com­mu­nic­a­tion between your PC and any Bluetooth 1.1 com­pli­ant device. Over 50 devices have already been suc­cess­fully tested.

Note: This guide was last updated in 2005! Links to the patcher util­ity have been removed due to the threat of legal action by Broad­com Corp. The patcher was ori­gin­ally released on GSM–Forum and I believe cop­ies of it may still be found there. To the best of my know­ledge the patcher hasn’t been updated in a long time. This guide was writ­ten for a ver­sion of the Bluetooth drivers which are now very old. It was also writ­ten with Win­dows XP in mind and may not work with Win­dows Vista or Win­dows 7.

Who this guide is for

The pur­pose of this guide is to take you through a step by step pro­cess, at the end of which you should be able to estab­lish com­mu­nic­a­tion between your PC and any Bluetooth enabled device. This guide is based on the Wid­comm Bluetooth suite which only runs on Microsoft Win­dows. If you use a dif­fer­ent sys­tem, for example MacOS or Linux/Unix, this guide will not be able to provide you with a com­plete solu­tion but much of the inform­a­tion should be use­ful to you. I do not provide any kind of guar­an­tee that this will work for every single case, it is a free resource of inform­a­tion, and exists only to attempt to help people.

Recent updates

• Restored to full glory on DIY Media Home

Cred­its

This guide wouldn’t be what it is without the many con­tri­bu­tions I have received. Please help us to improve the guide still fur­ther! If you find any inac­curacies, please get in touch. If you have a device that isn’t lis­ted on the tested devices list please send an e-mail so it can be added. If you have any sug­ges­tions, inform­a­tion, or new ideas that might help oth­ers please send them. Thanks.

I would like to thank the fol­low­ing people for their extens­ive con­tri­bu­tions: Phantasm4489, Bluetooth­Mas­ter, Lion_III, Derek Bartram, Chris Walker, Andrew Lord, Mark Aller­ton, Ray Hilton and all the con­trib­ut­ors to GSM–Forum.

What you can do if this guide doesn’t work

Don’t give up! There are often some dif­fi­culties get­ting everything to work cor­rectly, but with a little patience and care you’ll get it fixed. I have added a Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions sec­tion to the guide which can answer many ques­tions. If you’re still strug­gling try some of the fol­low­ing links before email­ing me:
The F.A.Q. | Whizoo.com | PC-Counselor.com | Geekzone.co.nz | GSM–Forum | Howard For­ums | The Expansys Forum | Socket Forum

I’m lost already, where do I start?

Due to the sheer quant­ity of inform­a­tion con­tained, this guide is arranged across mul­tiple pages. There is a link at the bot­tom of each page to the next page of the guide. Before start­ing the main pro­ced­ure there are sev­eral other pages that every­one should read. Once you have read through this intro­duc­tion you should go to the next page…