IoGear BT Headset with T42 Integrated BT

[vodka]

Oh boy, where do I start? Can I just say that I think the BT stack that comes preloaded on the T42 Thinkpads is crap?

I went out and purchased an IoGear headset in order to use it with my Thinkpad T42, here I was thinking built in BT, hooray. What a pain!

I can't pair up the headset to the laptop BT for the life of me (although it works fine with my own laptop at home with a Kensington USB dongle).

I checked out this http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 42+headset thread and tried the advice but now I have 2 icons in the taskbar, one that is white, and one that is red.

When I right click on the red one, it says Bluetooth Device Not Found and double clicking does nothing.

When I double click on the white one, I get a Bluetooth devices window with the following Tabs: Devices, Options, COM Ports, and Hardware. The Devices tab allows me to Add devices (could not pair up with the IoGear headset, but it found a bunch of other devices around my cubicle). The Hardware tab shows no devices at all. The Options tab won't allow me to save any changes I make in it.

My Device Manager show only IBM Integrated Bluetooth III under Bluetooth Devices, nothing about BT under USB Controllers.

I'm very computer literate and I can't believe what a pain this is. From all I've read on BT it seems that the MS SP2 BT stack is $**t. Can't there be an easy way to configure Integrated BT to work with headsets? I'd like to use the headset for my VoIP softphone, but if this is such a pain, I may try and find small wired headphone/mic combo (like cell phones have).

Any help would be appreciated on this topic,
Thanks folks!

[christopher_wolf]

I actually would tend to agree; from a similar experience

From what I found, the Microsoft stack enables BT; but has little to *no* support whatsoever for the services of various BT devices (Audio Gateway, PIM File Transfer, etc)

I discovered that whilst installing Bluetooth on an X40 Thinkpad for a friend; it was a TRENDNet Bluetooth USB Adapter with its own driver software. I first tried it without the specialized drivers from the maker by just using the MS drivers. I soon found out that it didn't do anything like my T43 Integrated Bluetooth did (AG, File transfer, etc) So I installed the TRENDNet Bluetooth Drivers and Application over Microsoft's stuff and it worked fine.

It seems to me that COM ports are being created for each of those services, and MS doesn't do this with their BT Stack. HTH

[vodka]

I now have 2 bluetooth icons on my tray, one red and blue, the other white and blue.

When I right click on the red and blue one it says "Bluetooth device not found".

In the Device Manager, I show only IBM Integrated Bluetooth III, and the driver listed is WIDCOMM 1/14/2004 1.4.3.4.

Still can't get the headset to pair up, but at home on my laptop with a USB dongle it works just fine.