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I'm a new user and I doubt I'll be a frequent one, as we all know thinkpads don't fail often, right?
I know there's been posts labeled similarily to mine but none of them helped me so far.
I apologize for this post being longer then usual but I have researched my problem thoroughly and will make an attempt in describing it in detail, hope you tech-minded people can apprecciate it
.Bear with me
My laptop is a ThinkPad A31 with WinXP Professional. Under the cover on the bottom of the laptop there is a WiFi card (possibly with a built in modem, as it has two-pin connector with it) and an Ethernet card. There is no dedicated bluetooth antenna.* My laptop in this setup has served me well for years, although a couple of weeks ago it started to freeze randomly, which as I've read, is not uncommon, but that is a completely different subject.
Recently I bought a bluetooth+modem card BMDC200. I put it under the aforementioned cover, where its place is clearly marked "modem/bluetooth", next to the Ethernet card. I have used the AUX antenna from WiFi to serve temporarily as Bluetooth antenna, and had the MAIN antenna disconnected from WiFi just in case... I don't think antennas are relevant in this story, but I may be wrong.
A new hardware was found after booting, turned out to be a Lucent Technologies Modem. Nothing else was found.
After some digging I learned about powering on the bluetooth unit. Under the screen front cover I have the inverter that includes the button+light to activate bt - I thought I was off to a good start...
When pressing the bt button, the indicator LED turns on and off as it should, but no new devices show up. I've tried different device drivers** at this point and they all seem to install fine, but still, nothing pops up in device manager and bt software cannot find any bt hardware in the system. Rather expected, a modem is still visible no matter what.
Next, I have taken the BMDC200 card out, booted again and tried BT button thinking it is not being recognized by the system. Well, pressing the button without a card present produces a message on the screen: 'Depress the ThinkPad button and consult ThinkPad Solutions to find information about Bluetooth communication card.'***
At least we now know the button itself works.
There was just one more thing I've tried. My WiFi with supposedly built in modem has a black cable plugged in to its modem(?) connector. This connector looks exactly like the one on my BMDC200 card. I remembered reading somewhere, that the older BDC card had such a connector to power it up. Thinking this may help I disconnected the black cable from a WiFi card and plugged it to my bluetooth card. This action didn't change the situation at all, and, if anything, this black cable is not there to provide power.
By the way, the BIOS in my laptop is from 2005. There is one upgrade available, dated 2006, but I don't want to use it unless I'm sure it's necessary.
The questions are:
Is my BMDC200 faulty? I don't think it is as the modem part of it is obviously working. I have also seen people talking about only modem being visible out of the two... If they made theirs work, what am I doing wrong?
Thank you (for your patience
)*)I can get you a photo of the 'internals' if you think that's crucial
**)Drivers I've tried so far (next one always after uninstalling previous one):
bthwxp1o.exe
tpbteba.exe
widcomm
bluesoleil 6.x
***)I read about different ways to activate/deactivate bluetooth and here's what I found:
- Fn+F5 doesn't work on my system at all (function keys installed)
- BDCPWR.exe tool found in BDC\TOOLS changes the state of the bt indicator LED which means system reacts to it, but, strangely, does not produce any on-screen message - that is not good for my testing purposes.
