bluetooth connectivity

I'm not sure if I can get help on this here or not, but I'm giving it a shot. I am having trouble tethering my cell phone to my computer using a PAN. The built in bluetooth on my laptop will not recognize my blackjack as being PAN enabled. I used this feature regularly on my previous laptop with XP SP2, but am having problems now with vista.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I've read that the problem is the bluetooth stack and heard that you can get this to work with the toshiba bluetooth stack for windows, but when I tried installing this it had problems installing the driver. . . .during the install a window pops up and ask me to plug in my bluetooth device and hit ok, which is obviously a problem being that my bluetooth device is built in and constantly plugged in. Anyway, any help appreciated...thanks.

Eric

 

You could take out the bluetooth device by opening your laptop. Look into it.

This is not a solution really but something to think about.
Even an internal bluetooth device is just a chip on the motherboard that can be removed.
I put in a internal bluetooth device on my Dell D630 laptop after buying it dirt cheap on ebay.

 

You gotta give more details than this.

I'm currently bluetooth tethering my Treo700WX to my laptop for PAM, and it works fine. I tried two different adapters, and the first one (the Kensington Micro adapter) was a piece of junk that used the Toshiba bluetooth stack.

Truth be told, if your laptop is already detecting the bluetooth adapter, you don't need to load any specific bluetooth stack to make PAM work. You only really need to install Toshiba's bluetooth stack if you're trying to make bluetooth stereo headphones and the like work. Otherwise, for PAM it just uses a plan Bluetooth serial link, which the default bluetooth stack in Vista will do.

Now, give us some more details, like are you having problems pairing your phone to your laptop? Is it pairing up, but not initiating the PAM link? What kind of phone is it, and who is your service provider?

Without details, you're not going to get very far...

 

-waitaminute....

just re-read your message. Are you talking about *PAM* or Private Area Network (so, you can use Activesync for example)?

 

I can pair my phone and my computer, the problem arises with my computer not recognizing my blackjack as a PAN enabled device. I am using AT&T service and a blackjack I. I'm not sure of what other details you'd like, but I'll be glad to answer any other questions. I would love to be able to use the standard vista stack if possible, was just trying any other options that I could think of.

Sorry about the detail, thought I got pretty detailed, but let me know if you need anything else.

~Eric

 

It is a problem with BT stack. Try some other drivers if you can, but I wouldn't count on it too much. I am surrounded with Pocket PC and smartphone devices and they are all Microsoft Windows Mobile devices. PAN works as usual in Vista. I reckon that on XP you installed some drivers and there you got your PAN support. In Vista if you cannot use PAN, it must be stack that usually comes with BT drivers for Vista. Now on laptops it can be hard to find any BT drivers besides the ones you have already in OS. If you can get some external BT adapter and its drivers just to try if it works, then you will know for sure if your phone works with Vista in PAN.

Contrary to many people's opinion, BT module is not usually soldered as a chip somewhere on the motherboard! Usually it is just a little USB stick stuck somewhere under the hood. If you go to the device manager, find BT device, check its properties, go to the details tab and choose Hardware IDs. Copy that code that looks something like USB\VID_0DB0&PID_A97A and check on google. Perhaps you will find that USB BT in many other laptops and external BT dongles and find some drivers that work with it.

I hope you wll find something that works, since PAN works like a charm for me and saves me a lot of time everytime I use it.

I hope this helps,

Ivan

 

Thanks alot for the advice. Definitely sounds like something to try. From the research I've done, there are many people having this problem. I had no problems on XP, and was using the built in device with the pre-installed drivers. There are a few problems I'm running into with Vista that I didn't have trouble with on XP, but I guess I should have listened to everyone before I got it on my new computer. OH well.

Thanks again.