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December 26, 2005
Kensington USB Bluetooth Adapter Problems
It's Christmas, and I'm out in the middle of nowhere (actually, I'm staying at my boss's cabin near Mabel Lake). There's no broadband. There's no cellular coverage. For someone like me, it's a technological wasteland. My only link to the outside world is a dial-up phone line that can get 31.2kbps if I hold my mouth just right.
One of my Christmas presents was a Kensington Bluetooth USB adapter (model number K33085). I wanted a bluetooth adapter for my laptop so that I can talk to my Audiovox PPC6600 cell phone. Against my better nature (and because this whole bluetooth thing is new to me) I decided to actually read the instructions, and follow the installation procedure that came with the device. I installed the drivers from the CD that came with it. After a reboot, I fired it up, and was able to connect to my cell phone. A very short time later, however, I discovered that there were some serious problems. I was rarely able to successfully complete a hotsync process, and I was unable to successfully copy any file to my phone that was over about 2Mb in size.
I decided to fire up the high speed connection to the outside world to see if there was an updated driver available. I searched all over Kensington's web site, but barely found any mention of the device in their support section. I couldn'd download drivers. More googling discovered this page. Ouch! I wished I'd have read that page sooner. Anyway, I still had the device, and I still had a problem. After diving in to the device manager on my machine, I discovered that it appears that the actual manufacturer of this device is MSI. Some searching around their site came across a driver-only download (no bluetooth stack). I didn;t need the stack, because I found references to the fact that SP2 for XP had a built in stack. I used Add/Remove Programs to remove the original bluetooth software, then (after a reboot), plugged the dongle in again, and pointed it to the MSI driver. Bingo! The device was detected, and a whole bunch of Microsoft drivers for bluetooth functions were installed.
After this process, I am now able to hotsync, and I've moved plenty of large files back and forth.
Tags: bluetooth | kensington | msi |
Posted by Ian at December 26, 2005 08:55 PM
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Comments
Great Post! I have the same stupid bluetooth dongle and I couldn't find the CD or any information on the Kensigton site. Your post and links really helped me out! So far it works great.
Posted by: Greg at March 2, 2006 06:37 AM
you are a life saver man!!! this has finally made my stupid kensington bluetooth adapter usefull!!!
thank you soooooo much
Posted by: Pnut at March 21, 2006 06:58 PM
Thanks you ROCK!
Posted by: Brent Bonet at May 4, 2006 06:05 AM
I have tried all of the above with no prevail until I stumbled across these...sign up for a free account and download them worked great.. http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=442301
Posted by: Paul at May 20, 2006 03:55 PM
Found the driver, now I just gotta get it to work. Just wiped my computere so we'll see what happens
Posted by: Joe Philipson at July 26, 2006 11:40 AM
I found this FTP driver site for Kensington Bluetooth devices. Mine was a K33348. This had the drivers I needed.
ftp://ftp.kensington.com/BT/
Dan
Posted by: Dan at August 30, 2006 02:31 PM