355 Bluetooth Driver

First of all, I've just received my Inspiron 6400 a couple days ago, and so far I am very pleased with this notebook


I recently did a clean vista install on my 6400, and I downloaded all the necessary drivers at dell's support online. However, I am having trouble fully downloading the bluetooth driver. At some point in the setup, it tells me to turn on the bluetooth device by pressing Fn+F2, but that is the switch for my wireless. It gives me another option to turn on bluetooth through the radio control (?) I don't know where that is.

How can I turn on my bluetooth? Thanks in advance.

 

when you press Fn+F2, all the radio devices get activated.. WiFi and Bluetooth..

Then if you have disabled bluetooth manually, go to the bluetooth option and activate it..

once you have started bluetooth, it will start with whenever u press Fn+F2..

but my advice is that turn off ur radio devices unless u r using them since they consume battery power

 

and u will get the radio control options thru the dell support button on the system panel.. i think its called "Dell support"... cant remember it right.. open it and u will get a link to radio controls.. there u can see blue tooth option

 

and almost forgot!! congrats and welcome to the club!!

 

You can control what the fn+f2 key does in the BIOS. (both, wireless only, BT only, etc)

 

I went to the BIOS and configured the control to BT only just for this once, but the bluetooth isn't responding.

Is there any other way to turn on my bluetooth?

 

I am having the same issue. My bluetooth doens't show up in the device manager or network control panel, and when I try to install the drivers I get the same message as you. I even chaneged the settings in the BIOS and still nothing. Last night I chatted with dell tech support. They said it was a known issue and that they were working on it. They told me that they would call me in two days with a resolution. We'll see...

 

Had the same issue when I reinstalled Vista. Bluetooth radio will not turn on. Think what I did was go to the device manager, add legacy hardware, network, then search for the 355 inf file to do a manual install.

 

I have the same issue. But this method does not work in XP

Anyone can tell me how I can install the driver in XP?

 

I contacted Dell support first by chat and then by phone.

They had me check the BIOS settings, reseat the bluetooth card, and try to install the drivers.

I still had no luck getting the bluetooth recognized in the device manager, so I was not able to install the drivers.

After this troubleshooting, the rep said that I had a bad bluetooth card. So, dell is sending me a new one. I am skeptical that this will work considering the fact that my current bluetooth module worked before I switched to Vista, I'll find out in a few days.

 

Robbirzell,

did the new bluetooth card work out for you?

 

It was just delivered today. I'll try installing it when I get home tonight and I'll let you know then.

 

I just got home, plugged in the replacement card, and it worked. The bluetooth light came on, it appeared in the device manager, and I was able to install all of the drivers, so I think I'm in business. I haven't tried to connect any devices yet, but I'm assuming that everything is in working order at this point.

 

I just worked through this problem. According to this article on Dell Support, the issue is that you turned off the bluetooth adapter on your previous working installation. The adapter cannot be found on your new installation because it has been switched off internally, so it can't communicate with the computer. Yeah, that's some pretty lame firmware they've got on the 355 and I'm surprised there there hasn't been a utility released yet to flip it back on.

I tried to do the "add legacy hardware" as mentioned before in this thread, but that didn't seem to work for me. I think. It's hard to tell what exactly it was that got it up again, but what I think worked was plugging in my desktop computer's USB bluetooth adapter and then installing the dell drivers (actually, I went to Anycom's site and got the drivers for their dongle, which isn't the maker of my dongle, but their drivers are generic and newer than Dell's at the time of writing). After reboot I hit Fn-F2 again and the 355 adapter came up in the tool tray, where I click on the icon to enable it.

Not the best directions on my part, but this should steer anyone else who has problems in the right direction.