Dell Bluetooth 350 problems on Vista

I have a Dell laptop, with a Dell 350 Bluetooth adapter. It works most of
the time, but sometimes it stops working, and when this happens, the only
way to fix it is to force the machine off and on. Even if I click
'shutdown', it
closes the desktop and starts to shutdown, but never leaves the 'shutting
down' state, so I have to force the power off. I've waited a few hours, to
see if it would ever finish, and it didn't.

Has anyone else seen this problem? Since the machine gets stuck in the
shutdown state, no crashdump is generated, so I don't think any failure
information is being sent to Microsoft. Is there any way to force the system
to crash if a shutdown fails to complete after a certain amount of time?
I've tried the registry settings to trigger a crash from the keyboard, but
nothing happens, maybe because of the laptop BIOS/keyboard.

Thomas

When I say it stops working, I mean the Bluetooth adapter. The laptop
continues to work normally, except that I can't connect to anything over
Bluetooth.

>I have a Dell laptop, with a Dell 350 Bluetooth adapter. It works most of
> the time, but sometimes it stops working, and when this happens, the only
> way to fix it is to force the machine off and on. Even if I click
> 'shutdown', it
> closes the desktop and starts to shutdown, but never leaves the 'shutting
> down' state, so I have to force the power off. I've waited a few hours, to
> see if it would ever finish, and it didn't.
>
> Has anyone else seen this problem? Since the machine gets stuck in the
> shutdown state, no crashdump is generated, so I don't think any failure
> information is being sent to Microsoft. Is there any way to force the
> system
> to crash if a shutdown fails to complete after a certain amount of time?
> I've tried the registry settings to trigger a crash from the keyboard, but
> nothing happens, maybe because of the laptop BIOS/keyboard.
>
> Thomas

John here, support analyst at Dell headquarters.

When faced with problems like this, the first thing I would suggest is
uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for the specific device. The
Vista driver for the Dell bluetooth 350 can be found 'here'
(http://tinyurl.com/2docjj).

If that doesn't do the trick, you may want to try running the system in
a reduced boot configuration, i.e. clean boot, in order to see if any
software you are running is somehow causing the problem:

'Clean Boot Troubleshooting' (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/331796)

Since it is an intermittent problem, that may be a little tricky, but
it's worth a shot!

John
Dell Customer Advocate


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DellCA