Dell TrueMobile 355 connectivity problems on Vista - SOLVED!

[heathcliff74]

Hi everyone,

First of all, I want to thank everybody who has posted his knowledge about bleutooth-problems on this forum. It helped me a lot with the problem I got with bluetooth on my laptop. Now it's my turn to share info. Some of the info is very specific and can only be used by others who might have the exact same problem I had. But other info might be helpful to many people.

A little introduction:
I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 (or E1705) with internal Dell TrueMobile 355 bluetooth device, which has a Broadcom BCM2045B1 class 2 chip. First I had Windows XP Pro installed. Whenever I had used bluetooth I regulary experienced BSOD's with memory parity errors. I'm not really sure what caused the BSOD's but I'm positive they were related to bluetooth. I never solved that problem, because I installed Windows Vista Business and I didn't have the BSOD's in Vista. But it was still unstable. Some processes crashed randomly. I contacted Dell and they sent me a new bluetooth device. Thanks to Dell for that. It ran much better but I still got problems with it. After much research and investigation I can conclude that the first problem might have been a firmware issue, as I didn't even realize the driver installation packages also flashed the firmware of the bluetooth device.

Now the problem I got with the second device:
After I installed it I nothing crashed, so that one was solved. But after a reboot the device didn't work. Only after turning it off and back on it worked. Then after 10 minutes I lost connection again and I had to turn it off and on again. Really anoying.

A colleague of mine had the same problem and here's someone else who has had that problem: http://www.notebookforums.com/post2467558.html. He solved it by killing a specific thread in the driver. That's good but it is an old driver on XP, and I'm on Vista.

I've tried many drivers from Dell and from other manufacturers. I also read about firmware versions. I tried different versions from Dell, but I didn't want to patch firmwares from other manufacturers unless I was sure that it would solve my specific problem. So I didn't do that.

I found many 'guides' on this and other forums for installing Widcomm drivers. I only understood later that the Widcomm drivers in XP and Vista are very different. On XP the entire stack and drivers that are installed are from Widcomm. On Vista, the Widcomm drivers are an extension to the standard bluetooth stack from Microsoft. You can't uninstall the Microsoft stack and then try to install the Widcomm drivers and the device must be enabled to install the drivers and flash the firmware. Also for flashing the firmware you need both the Microsoft drivers and Widcomm drivers to be installed. This all different from what is advised in the guides for XP drivers (5.1 series).

Other differences between XP and Vista become apparent when trying to flash the firmware. The firmware flash utility (DfuWizard) is embedded in the driver setup, but it can be run separately. But don't try to download the utility from a forum, because it might be a version for XP and it won't work. Just look under the Program Files\Widcomm for the DfuWizard. The different firmware versions can be found be extracting the Widcomm drivers and look in the 'svcpack' folder for the dfu-file. The firmware must match the manufacturer and hardware-id of the bluetooth device. So you realy should just use firmware-files from Dell drivers. The current version of the firmware installed on the bluetooth device can be found in the device properties in XP. But in Vista there is no way (that I know of) to determine the current firmware version.

So I tried many versions of the Widcomm drivers and I also tried the BlueSoleil drivers using this guide: http://www.wiili.org/forum/bluesolei...ters-t794.html. The driver can be downloaded here: http://www.bluesoleil.com/download/. It has a 5Mb limit. You can buy an unlimited version of the driver for 14.95 Euro or look elsewhere on this forum to download an unlimited version. I found out that when using the Bluesoleil drivers, I could keep the bluetooth connections run stable by killing the second thread of BlueSoleilCS.exe using Process Explorer. But I couldn't find a good solution to do that automatically. Manually killing a thread after a reboot was not really an option for me.

At last I found out that the latest version of the Dell firmware was only supplied with the XP drivers for the Dell TrueMobile 355, which can be found here: http://support.us.dell.com/support/d...&fileid=216131. It is version 2.1.216.367. It is newer than the version currently supplied with the latest Vista drivers, which is version 2.1.216.296. After trying this and then trying different drivers I found that the only winning combination, which solves my problem is firmware version 2.1.216.367 with BlueSoleil drivers version 5.0.5.127!

To get this working on Vista you need to install Widcomm first to be able to flash the firmware version. Then uninstall Widcomm and then install BlueSoleil. Follow these steps at your own risk! I don't take any resposibility in case you screw up!

1. Uninstall all current bluetooth drivers and reboot.
2. Download and install the Dell / Widcomm drivers 6.0.1.3100 for Vista here: http://support.euro.dell.com/support...&fileid=188664 and reboot afterwards.
3. Download the Dell / Widcomm drivers 5.1.0.3400 for XP here: http://support.us.dell.com/support/d...&fileid=216131.
4. Unpack the XP drivers using WinRar.
5. Locate and start SetupBluetoothFirmware.exe under the folder Program Files\Widcomm.
6. In the DfuWizard select the file v413C_p8126_BCM2045B1_002.001.216_DellEntwood_0367 .dfu which is extracted from the XP drivers and click next to flash the firmware.
7. Now uninstall the Widcomm drivers and reboot. After reboot Vista will automatically install the standard Microsoft bluetooth drivers.
8. Download and install the BlueSoleil drivers, but don't reboot yet.
9. If you need to patch a file to remove limitations, do it now (see other threads concerning Bluesoleil drivers). Still don't reboot.
10. Now modify two inf-files as described here: http://www.wiili.org/forum/bluesolei...ters-t794.html. For the Dell TrueMobile 355 you should use these values: VID_413C&PID_8126 as described in the guide.
11. Now reboot.
12. Go to the Device Manager and uninstall the Microsoft driver for the bluetooth device.
13. Disable and enable the device by pressing Fn-F2 twice.
14. When asked for a driver choose to browse for a driver and select the modified inf-file in the BlueSoleil folder.
15. Reboot.

You're done! All should work. I hope this info is useful for you. Good luck!

Greetz, Heathcliff.

[.::iRizwan::.]

Welcome to the GSM-Forum
Very nice & Comprehensive 1st post.
Wish you best of luck.

[Gh0stm@n]

Thanks for the detailed instructions but they didn't work for me. I followed until step 6 where you flash the firmware but the DFU wizard gave me an error saying that particular bluetooth device was not detected and asked me to select the correct DFU file. I have the Truemobile 355 physically installed in the machine already but it seems that the v413C_p8126_BCM2045B1_002.001.216_DellEntwood_0367 firmware is not the right one.

Any ideas?


~Kasper