Bluetooth driver support in x64

Revised: September 7, 2007

Bluetooth dongle

It is unusual for me to be surprised by an advancement in computing when it is related to a Microsoft product. I’m more than happy to sing and dance about a feature when it really works how it is supposed to, but that rarely happens with anything I do - until now. A few years back I made the transition over to 64bit computing and took the dive and purchased Windows XP 64-Bit Edition. It had only been out a few months at the time so hardly anything requiring drivers worked with it, which left me kicking myself trying to develop hacks with which to get my usb devices working. At the time use of a web cam and printer where paramount and fortunately there where some manufacturers producing drivers for them most notably Creative and Canon. However as time went on I found I required more drivers for a variety of different things, from graphics cards to fire-wire devices and again in the beginning I was left kicking myself. Eventually however with the launch of Vista and its 64bit counterpart hardware producers began to catch up and produce drivers compatible with 64bit operating systems. It has been two years since I bought a Belkin bluetooth dongle and today I finally got it to work.Admittedly the drivers have been out for a while, and I had actually given up trying to get it to work with the existing ones which came with the operating system (I got the system to recognise it but it wouldn’t connect to anything) but upon tidying my desk in anticipation of moving back to Coventry in a few weeks time I uncovered the lost dongle and thought I would give it another go. Belkin are actually quite quiet about their 64Bit support with no details on their website explaining any compatibility other than 32bit for vista and XP. I downloaded the XP drivers anyway as although it didn’t say it was 64bit compatible it didn’t pertain to being 32bit compatible either so I crossed my fingers in hope that it would be one of those dual drivers.

A short wait later I was much surprised to eventually see a successful install underway and not just drivers but a fully working application which seemlessly bolts onto “My Computer” and allows me to browse my bluetooth devices. It took about 10 minutes to set everything up and now I am quite happy to be having a bluetooth connection between my computer and my Sony Ericson K810i which takes some really nice photos. Basically all this means is more photo content to be posted here soon.