When attempting to connect external devices to your personal computer, these devices may sometimes wrongfully bear the blame when the connection doesn’t work out. Use this little-known tip to see whether your Windows machine is the culprit.
I recently bought laptop and I’ve been really pleased with its performance. It offers a reasonably small, basic, no-frills platform with a quick startup and a powerful processor that can run my resource-intensive Dragon Naturally Speaking voice dictation software faster than ever.
These few weeks into using this new machine, I ran into a snag when trying to attach a Bluetooth device. After consulting my PC’s onboard and the web-based help, I had no luck in getting the device to connect. I tried restarting my machine, restarting my device, and searching the web for an installer for the device. After installing and reinstalling that, still no go – I was pretty fed up.
Just as I was about to take the device back to the store for a refund, I remembered a little-known trick that had sometimes helped me in the past: a hardware driver update.
In this case, the hardware in question wasn’t the device hardware, but the Bluetooth hardware residing on my laptop. When I ran a driver update in Windows, I saw that the system was indeed downloading new Bluetooth software for my laptop. After the update wizard said the update was complete, I restarted my laptop. My troublesome device then connected.
Read on to see how to do an update…
While these instructions are specific to Windows 7, you can also use it for other versions of Windows by going to the equivalent screens in your OS.
Make certain your computer is connected to the internet.
While it's not absolutely necessary to restart your PC after making the update, it's generally a good idea to do a restart anyway. This locks in your new driver's settings.
