Archive for January, 2010

We ran into a problem onsite last week that doesn’t have good documentation on the internet so we’re doing our part to give back.

The problem was that we had installed a bluetooth USB dongle to communicate with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, but the bluetooth manager was not activated within the windows XP control panel.  Our device manager correctly recognized the device, and we knew it worked on another machine- just not it’s new host.

Probing for drivers revealed that bluetooth support is patched into Service Pack 2, Microsoft’s only advice to us was to use the control panel app, but without a shortcut, we were at a standstill.  A few minutes of reverse-engineering the Microsoft logic brought us to a conclusion and we discovered the fix:  It’s a service.

The only thing you need to do if you don’t have a bluetooth icon in your control panel is turn it on in services.  Click start, run, “services.exe”, ok, navigate to bluetooth and change it from “disabled” to “automatic,” and start it up.  If the remainder of your experience is anything like ours, you’ll be back on track within a few minutes.