Bluetooth help needed

I'm not sure if this is a software question or hardware. I have a cheapo bluetooth dongle I got off ebay. When I go into device manager, it is recognized as working correctly, identified as ISSC Bluetooth USB adapter, driver date of 7/7/08. According to the instructions in the XP help file, I am supposed to open Bluetooth Devices in Control Panel. There is no Bluetooth Devices in the Control Panel and clicking on the link in Help does nothing. Any ideas what I need to do to use this device? By the way, this worked fine on my desktop, but the install cd was lost and it has since been uninstalled on that machine.

 

Have you considered going to the dongle manufacturer's website and downloading the drivers?

 

Yep, but the device is not marked.

 

Try Bluesoleil. http://www.bluesoleil.com/download/ this one should work with most of the dongles...

 

I bought a cheap BT dongle, too. It works with my mouse and allows me to tether my cell phone for internet access, and might work for file transfer (using standard Windows drivers), but won't work with my stereo BT headset for things like Skype. I've tried Toshiba drivers and Bluesoliel. They both work, but are limited. Toshiba drivers have a 30-day evaluation period. If you're not the developer for the dongle's drivers, you can't buy it. Bluesoliet will cost you $20 or so if you want to go past the 2MB limit for non-licensed dongles.

I'm planning on upgrading my dongle when I find a good deal (e.g., Kensington).

 

Always you can try Broadcomm Bluetooth Stack from Asus BT drivers. I'm using this on two computers. To one of them I plugged this small USB BT Dongle and it work beautifully..

Link to Asus drivers: http://support.asus.com/download/downlo ... uage=en-us

It is Widcomm 5.1.0.5500. And it works with most of BT dongles...

 

Newer versions of Widcomm stack should work with all broadcom based BT adapters. Only the really old adapters (like the 1st generation Mitsumi I have) would not work with the new Widcomm out-of-the-box. I also have one Jabra and another no-name adapter that work without tweaking.

There are "tweaked" Widcomm stacks floating around on the net that will work with any BT adapter, including the Mitsumi I have. This involves some patching and tweak to the ini file.

Also note that you may need to manually disable Windows native BT functionality to get your Widcomm stack to work for advanced functions like headset, PAN, etc. MS knowledge base has an article on how this can be achieved.