alistairphillips.com

I’m : a web and mobile developer based in the Australia.


WinXP SP2 and Bluetooth

I've now installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 and have discovered a "lovely" extra little "feature". I've got a Belkin Bluetooth adapter that I've been using to link up my PDA and cellphone with and it's actually worked quite well (aside from the fact that it takes way too much setting up and fiddling to get anything done).

So I plugged in my device and installed the drivers (Widcomm stuff) and did the reboot, only to discover that after logging back into the system I've got two Bluetooth icons in my system tray. One's a nice light blue colour while the other one (Widcomm) is much darker. Aha, so this is SP2 trying to be nice and do things for me.

I'd heard about SP2 having support for Bluetooth adapters, even letting you install some adapters "without drivers" (true plug and play). But not so nice for me as it seems the Widcomm stuff is completely useless as it cannot access the hardware. This makes life quite difficult, even to get ActiveSync to work. The Widcomm stuff had installed loads of COM ports and the Microsoft stuff created COM13 which ActiveSync would not see (stopped at COM9) so I had to remove all the other ports and then it kind of worked - but the connection kept on dying.

Any ideas on how to get my stuff working the way it was before SP2?