Dell Inspiron 6400/1505 Bluetooth not activating

My Dell Inspiron 6400 came with Bluetooth enabled, and with Vista pre-installed. After some time with Vista, I promptly upgraded to Windows XP. Today I decided to give Vista another try and reinstalled it. While doing this, I found Fn-F2 would not activate Bluetooth, and the drivers wouldn’t install. It just stalled asking me to activate bluetooth by pressing fn-f2. Yes, my BIOS was set to activate both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on Fn-F2.

The problem, after searching around quite a bit, seems to be that after you down-grade from Vista to XP, it deactivates Bluetooth. In order to get it back, you need to run this utility Dell provides that enables it again. You can Get it here

After you install that, you should have no problems installing the Dell/WIDCOMM Bluetooth drivers.

Update: 4 days was enough. Upgraded to XP again!

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By Mikhail Esteves | November 30th, 2007 in Miscellaneous, Tips, Windows

16 Comments

AnonymousDecember 28th, 2007 at 7:31 pm

well dowmgrading is never a good option :)

vistaneedssp'sFebruary 8th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

well, uh i think the italicizing of upgraded, as was the use of the word, quite appropriate!

xdrylandxMarch 13th, 2008 at 10:50 am

Thanks for the link. I’ve spent the past 2 hours trying to figure this out.

JeevanApril 3rd, 2008 at 1:27 am

Thanks for the help! BTW works on Vista too

shieldsApril 15th, 2008 at 12:20 am

Thanks! I did the same thing and thought, “Where did my BT go???”

amitOctober 22nd, 2008 at 8:23 pm

hi i have same problem in my dell inspiron 1420 after upgraded from xp to vista my bluetooth is not working.
this patch is not working in my laptop bluetooth is still unactivate

AnonymousNovember 6th, 2008 at 1:10 am

Thanks! it worked like a breeze for my inspiron 9400 too :)

LaosNovember 8th, 2008 at 9:08 pm

People are just afraid of change, Vista is just like XP only with more eyecandy.

TayseerNovember 24th, 2008 at 9:11 am

Man….thanks very much…i been searching for this for ages lol
now i can use my bluetooth headphones with my dell :)

PeterDecember 13th, 2008 at 1:19 pm

Thanks a lot…I upgraded my vista home to business and suffered the bluetooth problem as well!

lakshminarayanajFebruary 26th, 2009 at 11:26 am

Thankyou man, u gave me R159805.exe to install in xp but not working on inpiron 1525 ,then i installed R161378.exe .NOw WoRking fine!!!!
thanQ!!!

Dinesh SehraApril 12th, 2009 at 11:05 pm

Hi Mikhail,
Thank you very much. My BT had somehow gone off and would not turn on, do whatever! This link was a great help. Now it is working good as ever.
Thanks.

JesAugust 30th, 2009 at 12:21 am

Thank you for the tip :-) It solved my problem spending more than 20 hours to make Windows XP works with Sony-Ericsson PC-suite on a Dell Latitude E5400 with Broadcom 370 bluetooth module.

Now the Widcom software are history here. The software takes too much control over the bluetooth wireless connection and mesh everything up. Uninstalled Widcom completely.

I have added the fix from Dell to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\
and made a new String Value, named it “Bluetooth ON” with the following Value Data “c:\windows\Btw_on.exe”. Now it works perfect and startst when I boot the machine.

malliJanuary 28th, 2010 at 7:10 pm

thanq for ur help……keep goingonnnn

AndersFebruary 7th, 2010 at 10:20 pm

I had exactly the same problem – with the difference taht I upgraded to Windows 7. After running the above peace of SW it’s now running smoothly. Thanks

dellAugust 14th, 2010 at 12:50 pm

thanks

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