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.