5The Bluetooth Guide

Troubleshoot­ing

Driver Prob­lems

It didn’t work: The first things to double check

• If you have an icon in the sys­tem tray that is white on a blue back­ground ( ) then you should skip the inform­a­tion on this page — your driver is cor­rectly installed already!
• Check that you fol­lowed the pre­par­a­tion instruc­tions correctly.
• Double check that you didn’t make any mis­takes in the main procedure.
• If run­ning the patcher pro­duced an error, reboot into safe­mode and run the patcher again
• If you weren’t logged on as a user with Admin­is­trator rights, try the pro­ced­ure again with an account that does
• If you have anti-virus soft­ware run­ning dis­able it and retry the procedure
• If you have a fire­wall installed on your PC make sure that the Wid­comm Bluetooth soft­ware has unres­tric­ted access — remem­ber, Bluetooth is a net­work­ing technology!
• If you are using a laptop / note­book with an Internal device that came with pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware, read the Internal devices section.
• If you didn’t reboot after run­ning the patcher, please do so now

The list above didn’t help and your device is a PC Card (PCMCIA)

Some PC Cards are a little tricky to loc­ate a driver for. Read the PC Cards section.

It still doesn’t work

It is pos­sible that Win­dows installed another driver for you device (such as the Microsoft driver) instead of the Wid­comm driver. Read the Manual Install section.

It still doesn’t work and your device is a USB device and is NOT lis­ted on the Tested Devices section

It is pos­sible that your device is not included in the list of devices that the drivers can recog­nise by default. Read the New USB Devices sec­tion.

It still doesn’t work

• Try remov­ing everything Bluetooth related from the com­puter, and try the pro­ced­ure right through from the begin­ning again.
• Read the F.A.Q.

MS Input Devices

The Microsoft Intelli-Drivers mess

Many people have advised me to avoid Intel­li­Type 5.0 and Intel­li­Point 5.0 drivers like the plague. Unfor­tu­nately, installing the Intelli drivers from the Microsoft CD will install Microsoft Bluetooth drivers, which break the Wid­comm driver install­a­tion. Without the Intelli drivers you will not be able to use the extra but­tons on your key­board or mouse. The solu­tion? Install an older Intelli driver! All the other wire­less key­boards and mice pro­duced by Microsoft have the same or very sim­ilar addi­tional keys to the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.

Where to get the older Intelli Drivers

Find them on the [ Down­loads ] page

Internal Devices

Laptop’s with Pro­pri­et­ary Software

Some laptops require their own soft­ware installed as well as the Wid­comm drivers. Toshiba, and Sony both pro­duce Bluetooth enabled laptops that have a soft­ware “switch” to dis­able or enable Bluetooth. If your device isn’t detec­ted after the main install­a­tion you may need to install the ori­ginal software.

Installing Toshiba’s pro­pri­et­ary Bluetooth software

• Down­load the Toshiba Bluetooth Mon­itor soft­ware from Toshiba 4.18 Mb
• Extract the Toshiba soft­ware to a tem­por­ary folder and copy the fol­low­ing files to the fol­low­ing locations:

• Open “Device Man­ager”, and unin­stall all of the Toshiba Bluetooth Devices which can be found in the “Bluetooth”, “USB”, “Ports”, and “Net­work” sections.
• Use “Add/Remove Pro­grams” to unin­stall the Toshiba Bluetooth software
• Reboot
• Run C:\Toshiba\MS_Bluetooth\BtMonInst.exe
• Right click on the Bluetooth Mon­itor in the sys­tem tray, and select “Power > ON”
• Win­dows should now install Devices. Your Bluetooth Sys­tem Tray should turn white.

If the sys­tem tray doesn’t turn blue and white you may still have a Toshiba / Microsoft driver installed. You should read the Manual Install section.

Manual Install

Manual Driver Installation

The manual driver install­a­tion should only be attemp­ted after the Wid­comm soft­ware has been installed. The descrip­tion below describes how to replace the Microsoft driver with the Wid­comm driver. If the Microsoft driver isn’t present you will not be able to com­plete the fol­low­ing pro­ced­ure. If you have a PC Card you should have already read the PC Cards sec­tion. The method for doing a manual driver update is dif­fer­ent on dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Win­dows, please use the pro­ced­ure that cor­res­ponds to your ver­sion of Windows

Win­dows XP / 2003 forced manual driver installation

1. Open the sys­tem con­trol panel, and in the “Hard­ware” tab, and click on “Device Manager”
2. Expand the “Bluetooth Radios” sec­tion of the device list
3. There might be a “Microsoft Bluetooth Enu­mer­ator” and another device listed
4. Double click on the other device, and in the “driver” tab, click on “update driver”
5. Select “Install from a list or spe­cific location”
6. Select “Don’t search, I will choose the driver to install”
7. Click on “Have disk”
8. Type in “C:\Drivers\Win\BDCACT”
9. Click OK
10. There should be 1 single device listed
11. Click Next
12. Click OK
13. The sys­tem tray icon should now be white & blue. If it isn’t, reboot your PC.

PC Cards

My PC Card didn’t find a driver

• Did you carry out part 10 of the main instructions?
• Have you read the Manual Driver Install­a­tion instructions?
• If you have a 3Com PC Card, see below

I have a 3Com PC Card

I have a cus­tom driver file avail­able for ver­sion 3 of the 3Com PC Card. Down­load it from the Down­loads page and save it to the main install­a­tion folder (C:\Drivers\WIN\BDCACT\). If you have a ver­sion 2 card, I do not cur­rently know a method of installing these. A firm­ware update may be possible.

New USB Devices

My USB Device wasn’t found…

Every USB device has a VID (Vendor I.D.) and PID (Product I.D.). If your device wasn’t found it is pos­sible that it’s ID is not lis­ted in the Wid­comm driver. The Wid­comm drivers will only install for devices they recog­nise, and they recog­nise devices based on their VID and PID. The install­a­tion file btwusb.inf con­tains a list of USB VIDs and PIDs that the drivers will recog­nise. All USB devices will work with the Wid­comm stack, but the ID’s for some of them are not included with the drivers. If your device is not included you will need to add it.

The major­ity of note­books / laptops with internal Bluetooth use an internal USB solu­tion. If you have a note­book / laptop and are exper­i­en­cing prob­lems get­ting the driver work­ing, you should read this sec­tion, even if you don’t have an actual USB dongle to plug in.

How to find the VID and PID of a device

This method will enable you to find the VID and PID for your USB Bluetooth hard­ware before it has a driver installed.

• Con­nect your Bluetooth dongle, and let Win­dows add it as an “Unknown device”
• Open “sys­tem inform­a­tion” from start/programs/accessories/system tools/system information
• Expand “Com­pon­ents”
• Select “USB”
• Loc­ate the device in the list
• It will have an ID in the fol­low­ing form: USB\VID_XXXX&PID_YYYY\ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
• Make a note of the VID (the XXXX) and the PID (the YYYY)

How to update your driver with the VID and PID of your USB Dongle

This ser­vice is no longer func­tional, sorry

• Fill in the form below with the details of your device.
• After you have suc­cess­fully sub­mit­ted your device details, right click >here and select “save tar­get as”.
• Save the file into the install­a­tion dir­ect­ory (C:\Drivers\WIN\BDCACT\). Over­write the old file.
• Remove your USB Dongle.
• Restart Win­dows.
• Re-insert the dongle.
• If Win­dows prompts you for a driver, point it to C:\Drivers\WIN\BDCACT\
• If you are not promp­ted for a driver and the sys­tem tray icon remains red you may need to start the install­a­tion pro­ced­ure again from the begin­ning using the new file.

Devices already supported

Unin­stall­a­tion

How to unin­stall Wid­comm drivers

The Wid­comm drivers should have a nor­mal add/remove option in the con­trol panel, regard­less of who sup­plied them. If your install­a­tion has become dam­aged, and for some reason you can­not use the nor­mal unin­stall­a­tion method, the details below should help you remove the Wid­comm drivers from your system.

The pro­ced­ure

• Make a back-up of your sys­tem registry
• Run “regsvr32 –u BtNeighborhood.dll”
• Run “btstackserver.exe /unregserver”
• Run regedit and delete the WIDCOMM key from HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
• Delete “bt*.dll”, “btcpl.cpl”, and “bt*.manifest” from your sys­tem folder (this var­ies depend­ing on which ver­sion of Win­dows you are using)