5The Bluetooth Guide

Troubleshooting

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)

Got some thoughts of your own? Indulge yourself below by commenting! If you would like to subscribe please use the subscribe link on the menu at the top right. You can also share this with your friends by using the social links below. Cheers.