Some trouble with Bluetooth on Windows (64-bit)

[Zekester2097]

Okay. My current day-to-day laptop (Toshiba Satellite, if anyone cares) used to run Windows 10... But soon I got sick of the current Microsoft bs, so I decided to wipe the drive and start fresh with some good ol WIndows 7. Fast forward to the present...

For some reason, my Insignia (or Broadcomm?) bluetooth dongle stopped working. But the thing is, it's got a very weird issue as to what's wrong...

You see, the dongle itself installs completely fine, without any trouble. But what happens is that when I try and pair my bluetooth headphones, or anything for bluetooth audio, Windows Update would come up empty when it tries to find drivers for the dreaded "Bluetooth Peripheral Device"... I've found several fixes for the drivers themselves, but the issue is this. When Windows Update fails to find the right drivers on its own, the pairing process with the device fails, but the device itself would still show up on the device list. So no matter which way I try and get the drivers working, I still cannot get a connection with the headphones... On top of that, the 'devices' (Referring to Device Manager stuff) get removed, when I remove the device to try and pair with it again... So yeah, I'm kinda stuck here....

I've gone ahead and used a WIndows 10 VM to test the bluetooth dongle, just to make sure I'm not going crazy, and sure enough, all works fine. (though using a VM for everything is kinda impractical... Especially Windows 10 imo)

I've run out of ideas... Any thoughts or ideas on how to help fix this issue? (Please. All of my wired headphones are broken )

 

[MidnightShadow]

So, it's trying to download the driver for the bluetooth dongle? Or for the device you're connecting wirelessly? To be quite honest, Windows 10 is far, far better at finding drivers than Win7 ever was. Not to mention the end of life for Windows 7 is January of 2020. I know it's still a little ways off, but... it's something to not forget.

 

[Zekester2097]

No, the dongle itself seems to install fine. But upon trying to pair my bluetooth headphones, three of the "Bluetooth Peripheral Device" come up empty, while two of them install as COM ports... For what I see, one of the three missing drivers are tied to the bluetooth audio connection with the headphones.

 

[PP Mguire]

I believe I remember having to use Toshiba Bluetooth stack for Windows 7 and even though that worked I still had troubles because Bluetooth in Windows 7 was pretty god awful still.

 

[Zekester2097]

Alright. Lemme give ya a little bit of context. I still had the original documentation that came with my bluetooth dongle. Said documentation included a 'driver' URL for computers that needed it (claimed the software supported, like, Vista to 10). Unfortunately, it redirected to a generic help/faq page on their site. With that said, I was talking with a good friend of mine about my issue in particular... And he had a good idea...

He told me to check and see if the Wayback Machine had any captures of the site... It did, but then I ended up hitting another brick wall... The download button was either broken on certain captures, or would redirect me to a page where I'd have to accept their license agreement, which was unfortunately also broken to where clicking "accept" refreshed the page. (I'm guessing the broken links had to do with how the Wayback Machine pulled the sites off of their original domain and such)... Anyways, my friend somehow had the crazy idea to see if he could inspect the captures and find the download URLs lurking about in the site.

While I had already known about Widcomm's bluetooth software, the version I had previously tried (version 12 or something) was non-functional, because it would try to download the software from a dead source... (You'll see why I brought this up in a second...)

Back to the story, I guess... He was able to link me to the download for the software, (which was version 6.5.1.6930, for the record)... I went ahead with the installation, after downloading the file... Sure enough, halfway through the installation, I saw the good old dialog box telling me Windows was installing drivers...

What's this? The software kinda sorta seemed to trigger Windows to make an attempt at installing the "Bluetooth Peripheral Device" (after it had failed, upon me trying previously, I mean)... And sure enough, after trying again and failing with Windows Update, it started to search the computer for drivers...

And it actually worked... I kinda lost it once I saw all of the "Bluetooth Peripheral Device" change to "Ready to use" with that green checkmark beside it.

So Windows 7 has full Bluetooth capabilities as far as I can see it, giving me one less reason to switch to Windows 10 lol.

Seems kinda pointless that I brought the issue here, but maybe this could all serve as a reference for a similar issue. (Because WIndows 7 is touchy with Bluetooth and stuff)

 

[PP Mguire]

Exactly why I brought up Toshiba Bluetooth Stack. It was the end all be all solution for me to be able to use Bluetooth devices vs stock Windows not being able to do **** in Vista and 7. It's a 3rd party stack vs the one built into Windows and works better.