Dell 355 Bluetooth Card.

[ctjoyce]

Okay, so I love the new lappy, but I have one problem. I decided to dual boot, just because XP is that much better for gaming than Vista, BUT my Bluetooth card decides not to work in XP. XP doesn't see it, the drivers don't recognize it, nothing. The best I can get is when I power on the adapter via the FN hotkey )Fn+F2) I hear the classic "Da Dum" from windows knowing new hardware is in the system, but it doesn't see anything, even my bluetooth LED doesn't come on. However shut down, boot into vista, no problem, Fn+F2 and bluetooth is active and useing my Wii Mote just fine. Anyone know of anything to fix this. Dell told me to go sodimise a dog because I was dual booting, and their forums aren't much help ithor.

Thanks again

Cheers
Cameron

[Nick N]

Dell and all hardware vendors are all under very high pressure from the Gods to remove all support for WindowsXP, especially for technology and entertainment devices... GOD wants control of your life and those devices are the key to getting his hands on it through Vista.


Most likely the cause is the drivers are simply not designed for XP use.


The only workaround would be in ascertaining if the electronics for the internal BT device may have a XP counterpart. In example, Linksys has Ralink chips on many of their designs and did not originally supply x64 drivers for the cards. As such, the x64 drivers from Ralink work perfect and actually perform better than the later released x64 drivers from Linksys.

[ctjoyce]

Okay so here is an update, I finally got windows to recognise that the bluetooth exists and even got the MS driver installed. Now it tells me that I can't power on the device. I am at a total loss, because I boot up vista, and no problems.

Cheers
Cameron

[Nick N]

Okay so here is an update, I finally got windows to recognise that the bluetooth exists and even got the MS driver installed. Now it tells me that I can't power on the device. I am at a total loss, because I boot up vista, and no problems.

Cheers
Cameron

50 bucks says the Bluetooth hardware is hard-coded to Vista Cam

The MS XP driver is probably missing the code string that tells the electronics it

[Nick N]

Bluetooth is pretty strait forward Cam. It's a device like USB in nature, pretty much universal with the drivers.


If its not working there must be a hard-coded reason for it. I can't believe a standard and typical device like that would not respond to a driver unless they told it not to if the Vista core call is not present

[ctjoyce]

Thanks for the replies Nick, and I managed to find out exactly what you told me through Dell's "XPS Specific" customer service (trust me, I knew more than the guy I was talking to on the phone). They told me that each card had a specific firmware that locks it to a OS, so because I got Vista preloaded the firmware on the 355 is vista locked, and no one seems to have a way around that.

Now I did find out something interesting. OSX saw the card just fine, as did Unix. So long story short, vista = presentation, XP = gaming. Meh it works for me.

Cheers
Cameron