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8/13/12

Removing and installing Widcomm drivers



Trying to cut down on my heavy headset casualty record, I needed something wireless. I got Teknikmagasinet's custom BT500 headset. My 1-2 year old Targus Bluetooth USB mini dongle would not run handsfree audio correctly under the supplied Vista drivers. Even Windows 7 pointed me to new drivers available from Broadcom, so I downloaded these drivers. This software complains about old BlueTooth software already installed, only problem is there was no uninstaller. Uninstalling drivers from device manager did not do it. After some testing, I found this to work:

On another Win7 box:
  1. Disable automatic driver updates
  2. Insert dongle 
  3. Answer no to install WHQ drivers
  4. Wait until all the USB discovering is over... could take a minute or two. (does not depend on your computer speed!)
  5. Install SE software
  6. Answer yes to all drivers from here on
  7. I had to cancel and reinsert dongle during device verification
  8. Copy Users/User/Appdate/Widcomm/Software to target machine

On target machine:
  1. Repeat steps 1-4
  2. Install retail drivers
  3. Install software from other box

I ended up having an unknown defect device in the device manager but everything works. So it appears the old 64 bit drivers from Vista works, only the software itself needed to be upgraded. Choosing this approach was better than a system reinstall, and not even 1 hour in regedit would let me hack my way out of the Widcomm registry mess.

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