Hi all, I’ve just bought myself a Palm Treo Pro, yay! It’s pretty cool overall and I’m mucking around with it at the moment. I’ve been able to get it to sync to my laptop with Microsoft ActiveSync and I can use it as a modem for my laptop via a USB connection. What I can’t do is get the PC to recognise the PDA via bluetooth. I’ve set the PDA to be visible to other devices and it can see the PC but the PC can’t see it.
The windows XP help wasn’t particularly useful as it told me to select menu items that don’t exist, specifically it directed me to click on “bluetooth devices” in the control panel, I only have “bluetooth configuration”. I had a look in bluetooth configuration anyway and it did have an option for adding a device but it still couldn’t find any bluetooth devices.
The PDA is only a few inches from the laptop so it’s not a problem of being out of range.
The laptop is running Windows XP Media Centre with SP2 and the PDA is running Windows Mobile 6.1.
Sorry, but these can be fantastically difficult to diagnose and fix. I went through the effort of trying to establish communications with Bluetooth devices and bought no fewer than 7 Bluetooth adapters (fairly well user-reviewed ones on Amazon) and tried to get them to work on two different Dell PCs, one a few years old and one weeks old. No two combinations worked the same, and no combination worked reliably and supported all the functions the manuals said were there, after many hours of work and joining Bluetooth discussion forums and going back and forth with Tech Support. I even found diagnostic freeware with signal strength meters in it. The best result was about 60% reliable. If I had the chance to I’d spend $1000 to have Bluetooth disappear off the face of the Earth, just so I don’t have to waste any more days fighting with it.
Windows “Help” told me to go to “Bluetooth Devices” in the Control Panel, this doesn’t exist. Instead I found what I wanted in “My Bluetooth Places” in My Computer.
The only slightly odd thing is that I can’t close the My Bluetooth Places window or it disconnects.
The few times that I’ve had to deal with Bluetooth keyboards or mice with PC’s, it’s either worked, or been a miserable experience. My bluetooth cellphone headset is pretty flaky itself.
I just tell myself that USB used to be as flakey, too. Now it seems to work pretty much flawlessly.