Lost Bluetooth Phone->PC Sharing Functionality

I'm using a Samsung Galaxy Ace smartphone and a Samsung NC110 Netbook.

After my hard drive failed, I was forced to do a fresh install of Windows 7 Starter, and in doing so I lost the ability to share photos from my phone to the PC via Bluetooth. Presumably I'm missing some software or driver but I just don't know what I'm looking for. The provided PC recovery disc only had Win7 on it, no drivers or Samsungware.

Symptoms

I was able to 'pair' the devices successfully. When I attempt to access the Phone via 'Bluetooth Devices' on the PC, the Phone is greyed-out and when double-clicked, all the device information is blank and the 'Bluetooth Services' list is empty.

Attempting to share a photo from the Phone to PC gives the message 'filename.jpg not sent'. No popups appear in the PC's System Tray (back when it used to work, I would get a balloon popup down there telling me I had an incoming file - alas, no more).

What I've Tried

All the drivers for my Netbook were downloaded and reinstalled from here: NP-NC110 - DOWNLOADS | SUPPORT | SAMSUNG UK

I didn't install everything from the 'Software' section of that website, since nothing from that section appears to relate to Bluetooth functionality.

All devices appear functional in Device Manager

Installed Samsung Kies and linked the phone with USB in the hope it would sort it out. It didn't (although connection over USB works fine and Kies was able to install the drivers for that)

Windows is fully updated

Bluetooth is active in 'Samsung WIFI Manager' app


If anyone can offer any advice on this I'd be very grateful. I used to use the feature a lot and I'm at a loss without it. Thanks for reading.

 

Hello Bovrillor, welcome to the forum.

While I cannot comment specifically on why your BT doesn't behave as expected (I don't use it myself) I can give you the the post linked here which is a general guide for clean install of Win7, including which drivers to install using SW Update and which to install manually. Most all other "Samsungware" you're best off avoiding altogether.

Win7 contains it's own Bluetooth drivers for basic mouse and keyboard and file sharing stuff -- even without any Samsung or Intel-provided PROset Bluetooth drivers. That said, you may want to install the BT drivers from SW Update if you want High Speed 3.0/4.0 functionality.

Samsung generally stopped updating their website with drivers. It's all through SW Update now.

NOW, that's all based on Samsung notebooks (Series 5, 7, 9, the new Ativ Books etc). Whether it also applies to the NC110 Netbook, I simply don't know.

If you want to search other past discussions within this forum, you can use Google searches such as site:notebookreview.com/samsung NC110 Netbook Bluetooth.

 

Thanks mate, I think we're more-or-less on the same page here.

Thanks to a rare stroke of luck, I was able to restore an old backup from a long-lost external HDD, thus restoring whatever item of software I had lost.

I still think it was a Samsung-specific item that was missing, I'm currently investigating the preinstalled software to try and identify it - just in case anyone else needs the info.

 

OK, thanks for the update. I'd say do check that link I gave you. It's a fairly well defined list of drivers that have to be installed in order to have everything working. Some are best installed with SW Update and a few are best installed manually.

 

Well, I tried a clean install on a seperate hard drive using the process in that post. Lo and behold, the initial problem resurfaced... paring worked fine, but phone->PC transfer did not.

Swapping back to the working install, I used my quickfire screenshot skills to get a shot of the tray icon that appears for a moment when receiving files over bluetooth.



(The censored bit is just my PC's ID)

Anyone recognise that icon? There's no installed app with a corresponding name that I can find.

 

Wow, I can't say you didn't try there, doing a clean install to test it out. I like that

If I get time this weekend, I'll boot my Win7 and see if I can reproduce this for you. Admittedly, mine is a very different machine, but maybe there are similarities. Which OS is your phone? Stock Gingerbread or custom ROM?