Bluetooth on M6400/Win7x64

Does anybody here have BT working well on the M6400 with 64-bit Windows 7? I have been trying a number of different versions of the WidComm stack, and the results are not good...

Essentially, I have one device, an old Microsoft Bluetooth Explorer mouse that I can get to connect. Everything else I tried (2 different Logitech mice, and my iPhone) either don't connect at all, or remain in some twilight state where Windows says the device is connected, but it cannot determine the capabilities of the device at all, and thus installs no driver for it (meaning, the device is shown as connected, but it doesn't work).

Overall, the behavior of Bluetooth on my machine seems erratic, even for the Microsoft mouse. For example, sometimes, I can get one of the Logitech mice to connect and work fine, but that is rare. Even if it works, the mouse may disconnect at some random time, and when that happens there is no way to reconnect it again. When the mouse disconnects, I get a warning in the System Event Log, source HidBth, "Bluetooth HID device (00:0d:3a:a3:e0:57) either went out of range or became unresponsive." Well, duh...
Also, after some time the BT radio seems to turn itself off entirely, and with the BT icon in the tray gone, there's no way to turn it back on. Incidentally, why the heck is there no Bluetooth shortcut in the Control Panel in Win7??? What I notice is that the BT light above the keyboard turns itself off frequently; maybe this is some powersaving feature, but maybe not? Sometimes when that happens, I can "wake it back up" by moving the mouse.

Sorry for the long post... To sum it up, at least on my M6400, Bluetooth seems to be entirely unusable.
Is this just a problem with my machine? Any advice, pointers? Thanks!

 

Don't know if this might help you with the bluetooth radio shutting off, but try going into device manager, select BT radios, select power management tab, and uncheck "Allow the computer to shut this device off to save power".

 

Man, that is so obvious that I never thought about it! You were right, that was the problem. For some reason, Dell's installer package lets Windows control the power management of the Bluetooth radio, with disastrous results. I unchecked the item, and now everything works like a charm! Rep to you, thanks!