I really do. At least, I love the idea of Bluetooth, because so far, that’s all I’ve been able to have. A vision of what it would be like. But I’m clearly far from being able to use it and really close to plain old giving up for now. I thought the days of messing with COM ports on my machines were behind me (way back in the late 80s/early 90s). But no, I was clearly wrong. Not only that, but it seems we now have some new COM ports (6-9) joining the party as well. All I need now is to read about some specific IRQ settings and I’ll feel like I’m 14 again. I’ve searched and searched and tried a bunch of advice (such as parts of this and many others) but I’ve had no success.

Actually, it was even embarassing. For the first couple of hours after giving it a first try and having to go to meetings, I was under the impression that I just wasn’t able to install the bluetooth stack on my machine correctly. I’d get errors like “Bluetooth is not ready” and a few other errors along those lines. It turns out I was getting those errors because my laptop turned out to not have the integrated Bluetooth support I swore it had. I wonder if Bluetooth is ever “not ready.” It just seems a bit strange to me. I wish it had just told me “Bro, it’s looking like you’re trying to use hardware that you don’t have” or at least “Bluetooth not home.”

Anyway, the other frustrating part is that I haven’t had a chance to spend more than 10-20 minutes at a time trying to make things work. I’ve been trying to do this on my work machine but work’s been really busy lately. All I wanted to get working was syncing my MPx220 with ActiveSync via Bluetooth. I went in thinking it was going to be a 2 minute thing.

I hope making the phone pair up with the new car will go a bit smoother than this has. The car still hasn’t come in though so we still have to wait a few more days to find out.

Well, while searching for those links above, I found another link (and another) that looks like it has some pretty reasonable instructions and information for making this thing finally work. I’ll see if I get a chance to try some of them tomorrow. Wish me luck…