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A blue tooth and a black eye

Recently I bought a bluetooth headset and a dongle to be used for voice chat.
The situation with bluetooth is a bit funny: it’s hard to get it working.
First one has to disable Microsoft’s bluetooth (using the “Remove from sys tray” option ..go figure), because apparently it has bugs, and most importantly, has no support for audio devices.
It took me a while to find that out. And so I was forced to use the software provided with the dongle: BlueSoleil. I find BlueSoleil a bit intrusive, because its window will pop up every time I boot the PC… considering the nature of the software, I was expecting that one had the option to have it start silently and only show up in the sys tray.

Anyhow things now seem to work, more or less. But it wasn’t easy. It also took me a while to realize that one has to hold down some button (sometimes something hard to find on some devices) for 6 seconds to have the device go in discoverable mode. Then one has to use the software to find the device and then has to insert some default passkey, a key that I assume one can replace.

I’m just glad that no member of my family has bought a bluetooth device yet, otherwise it would have been really quite an adventure for them, even with my (remote) help.

..facking technology.

Posted by Davide Pasca in Diary

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “A blue tooth and a black eye”

Rasty says:

Muu, I had the same troubles. There’s a tutorial somewhere over on the Linksys website that describes how to disable MS’s drivers and use the supplied ones. BT can be hell sometimes.. and it should be consumer technology! ha!

August 1st, 2006 at 10:30 pm

Davide Pasca says:

PC sucks ! It’s made to make experiments, not to be productive. One can only be productive with a well tested environment. Add a new piece of hardware or some software, and things start going wrong very quickly.
Of course, we are often in for the fun of experimenting, but it would be better if we didn’t have to mess around setting up the PC, and were instead forced to actually use it !

August 2nd, 2006 at 10:36 am

Rasty says:

I agree. I like to use my pc, not just try this and that piece of hardware and/or software to play with. My setup should be productive and above all I hate the reinstalls and re-configurations the MS software forces us to.

August 3rd, 2006 at 1:33 am

rince says:

i blame the trains!

August 3rd, 2006 at 2:16 am

HeldaiS says:

Hi Man ! I’ve no troubles, with my iMac ! hihihihi
Think Different

August 4th, 2006 at 5:18 pm

brian (aeris) says:

“First one has to disable Microsoft’s bluetooth (using the “Remove from sys tray” option ..go figure), because apparently it has bugs, and most importantly, has no support for audio devices.”

“here’s a tutorial somewhere over on the Linksys website that describes how to disable MS’s drivers and use the supplied ones.”

I had to do the same after SP2 for win xp came out. Just go to device manager, update the driver for “Generic Radio Device” (can’t remember the name exactly, but it looks mostly like that under bluetooth devices, there’s usually m$ and that radio thing, which are really the same device).

Use the option to manually pick the driver, then again pick the option below to show you a list of devices, then you are able to browse to the device’s supplied driver. Mine’s WIDCOM or something like that and it works much much better than the m$’s supplied with SP2.

While I haven’t used it for a headset I use it daily for remote control with my mobile (so I can rew/ff videos with winamp etc), it’s works quite great.

August 23rd, 2006 at 7:53 pm

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A blue tooth and a black eye

6 Responses to “A blue tooth and a black eye”

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