Bluetooth is hosed

[crogonint]

I'm not sure what to do here. The laptop had mistakenly installed the Intel Bluetooth driver. I removed the panel and verified that I have the Broadcom 2070. I uninstalled the device. I uninstalled the Intel Bluetooth driver package. The laptop still won't recognize the device. It doesn't even show up. It refuses to install the Broadcom driver, saying it's not detected. It's not disabled in Security Manager. I can see it exists and it's enabled in BIOS.
Help!

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

From what you posted, it sounds to me like you need to install the HP connection manager software, restart the PC and then see if you can turn on the Bluetooth using the Connection Manager software so the device shows up in the device manager, and the driver gets installed.

This package provides the HP Connection Manager for the supported notebook running a supported operating system.

https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp53001-53500/sp53394.exe

[crogonint]

First off, it's a little weird that when I click 'reply' to your message, it opens a box at the top of the page, instead of at the bottom. I reloaded the page like 5 times, and checked my ad blockers, because I thought that when I clicked reply, it was trying to make me edit my original post.

HAH!! After I installed connection manager, it reported that Bluetooth was 'Off'. Since when is an API allowed to interfere with WIndows device detection??

Anyway, that was the first part of the solution. After I rebooted, then opened Connection Manager and turned Bluetooth 'On', I still didn't have Bluetooth. It installed a barebones bluetooth driver, but that was it. I rebooted again, and nothing changed (no 'BLuetooth' in the task bar), so I went ahead and installed the appropriate Broadcom 2070 Bluetooth package from the downlaod reporistory for my laptop. THAT finally worked, and did all sorts of nonsense. Then it asked to reboot the system, so I let it. NOW, I have a Bluetooth icon in the task bar and what appears to be a functoining Bluetooth stack.

Just verified, it IS a functioning bluetooth stack! At least.. it's funcinting enough for me plug my Bluetooth ear buds so I can listen to tutorial videos.. which is all I needed at the moment. If I discover that bluetooth networking is mucked up in the future, I'll stop back and open a new request for assistance.

Thanks so much!!

Oh, almost forgot, one final question.. if I disable Bluetooth in Connection Manager in the future, won't that give the Broadcom software ( and/or the MS stack?) a complete nervous breakdown (panic)?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

When you turn off the BT in the connection manager software, everything disappears again from the Windows device manager.  No driver conflicts or hiccups.

Now that you have turned on the BT and installed the drivers, you can uninstall the HP connection manager and the BT will always be on.

If you ever decide to upgrade to any OS beyond W7, make absolutely sure that the BT is on, and uninstall the HP connection manager, restart the PC, confirm the BT is still on and then you can proceed with your upgrade to a newer OS.

Failure to do this will have the BT remain off for eternity since the HP connection manager does not work on OS's newer than Windows 7.

You would have to make a bootable Ubuntu installer and turn the BT on using Ubuntu (try ubuntu without installing option), or reinstall W7.

[crogonint]

That.. is.. amazing. One of my Personal tag-lines goes like this:

I will never ever in the history of upgrade to Windoze 10. It's a giant mess, and there will never be a WIndows 11 (it's 2020, hello?) MS either needs to kick their NextOS plans in to high gear, or admit defeat and pick out a custom Linux flavor to promote.

Seriously.

You folks should gently nudge them a bit, eh? 😄

I prefer SUSE myself, but they've been stagnating ever since they pledged to work with Microsoft, and all of the developers bailed on them. I just might install Ubuntu on this machine. I'm assuming I might as well just install an unsupported 'open' version on a machine this old. Could you recommend a Ubuntu distro and version for me? I know better than to install bleeding edge on to an older machine, but I've got no clue what versions of Ubuntu you folks used to support for this machine, or might provide drivers and etc. for. (Say, there isn't some sort of official HP Ubuntu release for this machine, is there??)

Thanks so much! You guys are awesome!!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

I don't work for, or represent HP so I don't know what version of Linux was supported.

On the driver support page, you can change the OS and there is a Linux option to select.

I don't know much about Ubuntu. I installed it once on a HP 8200 Elite CMT business desktop PC which has the same Intel 2nd gen core processor series as the 8560w, and it worked fine.

So, you could try the latest version Ubuntu offers and see how it works.  Notebooks are a little different since they usually have more complex hardware than desktop PC's.

I  knew about the trick to use Ubuntu to turn on the Bluetooth without having to reinstall W7 after someone upgraded the PC beyond W7 and found out the BT disappeared.

You can always make the ubuntu installer, boot from it and select the option to 'try Ubuntu without installing,' and that should give you an idea whether or not it will work on your mobile workstation.

[crogonint]

Yeah, I've already got a huge partition for SLED (SUSE desktop) set aside, but I'm not particularly fond of it. LIke I said, SUSE is backsliding. I figure I could back up my documents and replace it with an equivalent Ubuntu version but I have no idea which version that would be. I mean SUSE has like 4-5 main distributions, not including stable / developer and bleeding edge. I have no clue about Ubuntu versions.