2007 October 12 « Pale Musings

What to do when your bluetooth headset stops working in Vista

Since getting my new Dell Inspiron 1720 with the BH200 stereo headphones I have had many frustrating days. The initial installation and pairing went smooth and they seemed to work just fine; however, some days I would fire up the headset, connect it to the Dell and it would not start playing. After fiddling with settings and, at times, re-pairing the headset to the laptop I would finally get them working again. I had no clue why they stopped working!

A recently read this excellent tutorial from Katy Coe which enabled me to quickly fix the problem each time it happened. That was a step in the right direction! Now at least it was only a handful of clicks to get it working. I could now devote more time to figuring out why it would quit using the bluetooth headset automatically. Essentially she explains that Vista remembers at least the last 2 default audio devices you configured so setting the speakers as default, applying it, setting the bluetooth headset as default and applying again fixes the issue.

I finally tracked down what I believe to be the culprit and, since I could not find anything in my on-line research about it, I thought I’d share with you all. Here’s the trick:

Never let your bluetooth headset’s battery run out while connected to Vista!

That’s right. This seems to be the problem. If the battery runs out while it is connected something happens to change the default audio settings remembered by Vista. My guess is that it removes the bluetooth headset default setting altogether when the connection is terminated unexpectedly. This would go down as a bug in my book, albeit a minor one. It would be nice if Microsoft fixed this one in a weekly patch sometime. At least I know know the quick way to fix it.