THIS IS VERY OLD INFORMATION AND SHOULD BE USED FOR REFERENCE ONLY



Setting up Bluetooth Driver on the Windows PC
installing the drivers In practise, this is not complex, just a little bit time consuming. There are a few small "gotcha's" which, if missed, will result in a lot of head scratching. If you've already got your palm "talking" to your PC over bluetooth, surfing the net, controlling your PC with PalmVNC, you can skip this stage.

We'll assume you're starting from scratch and using a USB bluetooth adaptor. Don't plug the bluetooth adaptor in just yet! If you've got a PCMCIA adaptor, or it's built into your motherboard, follow the instructions for that device and then skip to the configuration section. Load up the CD driver disk. If you haven't got the CD, then you'll need to get a copy of the drivers and applications from the particular manufacturer of your adaptor [2], perhaps via their website.

Start the installation, and when instructed, insert the bluetooth dongle. This is quite a slow step and your PC may freeze for a while, be patient! Eventually, everything should complete and then you get access to the setup wizard. There's no magic here, everything should "just work". Accept all the defaults for now, and we'll change the important ones later.

You should now have the little bluetooth icon in your system tray which looks like this: bt icon normal, note that it's white on blue, which indicates all is well. If it's bt icon error then there is a problem. Consult the user guide for trouble-shooting, and/or click right-mouse on the icon to see if it will tell you what's wrong.

tweaking the configuration
There's only a couple of things you need to tweak in the settings.
Double-click the bluetooth system tray icon and you'll see the My Bluetooth Places window
 my bluetooth places
Use right-mouse-button on "My Device" and choose properties, you'll now see this: device properties 1
Select the Accessibility tab.
Ensure that "Let other bluetooth devices discover this computer" is ON, and that Allow is set to "Only devices listed below".

At this stage, turn your Palm on, find the "prefs" application, choose the bluetooth preferences, turn on Bluetooth, and ensure that the Palm is discoverable.

Use the Add button, it should find your Palm, select it, do "OK", and then "Apply".

Afterwards, you should see the name of your Palm (the name is set in the Palm's preferences) in the list of approved devices - here you can see that I added my Palm called PaulM. 		device properties 2
Select the Discovery tab
You can choose your own options here, in this case you can see what I prefer. 		device properties 3
Select the Local Services tab








Select the network service and click properties, and you'll get the Network Access window:
Here's where there's a vital change. The default option for "Select the type of service to offer remote devices" is Allow other devices to create a private network with this computer. Change it to Allow other devices to access the Internet/LAN via this computer. Without this change, you'll make network connections which don't actually pass any useful traffic!. Click Apply, then OK to close the properties window. Then Apply again on the Local Services window.

Note how it says that you'll have to approve the connection; in fact, when it asks you the first time you can say to always accept the connection. This, combined with the limiting connections to known/approved devices, is how your PC stays secure. Do not be tempted to allow any device to connect, and/or disable these security features, as the security of your PC would be compromised! 		device properties 4

device properties 4 net
We don't need to touch the Client Applications or hardware tabs; however for the sake of completeness here's the sort of things you'll see; the diagnostics don't have to mean much as long as it says "working". Note that you'll see an address where I have blacked-out my device's address for security/privacy. device properties 5 device properties 6
Ok, all done! You can now click back to go back to the main page.

However, if you taken some time to make it this far, take a coffee break?!

Note 2. Although there aren't actually many different manufacturers of the chips inside these units, many give them different names and this means that windows needs the drivers specifically built for the device you have; this is a real pain, but an unfortunate reality. Not only that, some device makers don't make their drivers downloadable on their websites; however, you should be able to get onto their customer support on their website and get sent a link to allow downloading.
You can also find some downloads here.


©2004 - Paul Mansfield, all rights reserved, this document may only be {circulated, shared, printed, propagated, published on paper or the internet} with specific permission of the author.
Version: 20041120 - Paul Mansfield - complete
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