Bluetooth took a dive..

Hi, I have a Vostro 1500 w/ Vista SP1. I've used Bluetooth extensively in the past, putting both a keyboard and mouse to use on a daily basis. I recently went out of state and didn't use it for a period of 10 days or so. On my flight back I had turned the wireless card and bluetooth off to save battery life on the plane. Upon my return, I turned that switch back on.

Unfortunately, my computer fails to recognize my bluetooth devices now. The bluetooth light is on, however it doesn't work. When I search for devices, it says none found. In device manager, no driver or bluetooth device is listed. When I tried to re-install the drivers, I receive a prompt from the installation program asking me to turn my bluetooth software on by using the radio switch or Fn+F2 or I have to cancel installation.

Has anyone gone through this or have any ideas?

 

Turn the switch back off.
Go into the BIOS by hitting F2 on start (Dell loading screen)
Change wifi switch behavior to both wireless and bluetooth.
Save changes and exit.
Reboot, turn on wireless switch. Fingers crossed that that is all it took.
If it's already on wireless and bluetooth, try changing it temporarily to just bluetooth to see what that does.

 

No dice, but thanks for the thought Hep!


I wish it was that easy!!! I think the problem is either hardware or windows related, fwiw.

 

Let's see if Unknown Devices picks it up.

I recently worked on a computer that the wireless would not work, and it wasn't shown in device manager. It wasn't the mini PCI-E slot, and it wasn't the card.
If you ran unknown devices, it found the device, but it was grayed out for some reason.
Ended up being a corrupt driver, and a chkdsk fixed the problem.

 

^ Sorry it has taken so long to reply but that did not do anything either. Does anyone else have any ideas?

I'm thinking of reformatting but I'd like to avoid the hassle if possible.

 

Boot with a Linux Live CD that supports BT and see if it works in that - if it does you have a driver/OS problem, if it still diesn't work the chances are the hardware has crapped out.

 

I have been having the same issue with my E6400. BT worked great for a long time. Now when using A2DP some days it just drops off and windows doesn't detect it.

Unknown devices picks it up and also so does powering down and turning it back on. After a reboot it may work fine or it may drop off again. I have replaced the BT module and even reinstalled. It does this with Vista and Win7!

I have an external BT adapter that I can plug in when the built in drops off and I have no issues. It uses the same driver and everything.