Note: This has all been made redundant by the latest release of the Broadcom software that is available here. That installs and works straight away with no problems for me on Vista x64.
I purchased a Belkin USB Bluetooth adapter (Model F8T013uk) a few days ago from Amazon. As expected it came with a driver CD stating version 6.0.1.5400. A few reviews mentioned it worked on Vista but none mentioned 64 bit. I tried using the installer from the CD via the Autorun menu and it failed to install. I then explored the CD and found an x64 directory. I installed from there via the setupx.exe file and thought all had gone well. The driver itself installed which I could tell because Device Manager now showed a Belkin USB Bluetooth adapter. The installer said it had to reboot to complete the installation. After a restart nothing happened. There was no desktop or startmenu icons so I manually navigated to the installation directory and tried running the tray icon tool. Nada. It showed up under Task Manager but refused to actually appear in the tray.
Alot of sites link to a dev-hacks article which details how to modify the drivers to work, I didn’t want to do this as drivers have to be signed to work properly in Vista 64 and even though you can disable driver signing via the boot-up F8 menu I simply couldn’t be bothered doing that each time I wanted to use a Bluetooth device. So began the adventure of getting my Sony Ericsson W850i mobile phone to talk to my PC via Bluetooth without hacked drivers.
Continue reading “Belkin USB Bluetooth Adapter On Vista 64”