Z series bluetooth problem?

I've owned the Z series for about 5 months now and I used a wired mouse with it when I'm at home. My dad's purchase of the SB came with a free mouse (as a compensation for delivering the computer 2 days late). My dad then gave the mouse to me.

I have quite a bad experience with the mouse over the last few weeks. The mouse can suddenly stop responding once every 5 minutes, sometimes even unresponsive for up to a minute. I accept the fact that wireless technologies are less reliable, but come on, once per 5 minutes? You gotta be kidding me.

To test if its the computer or the mouse's problem I paired my Apple Wireless Keyboard to the computer. Not to my suprise, when the mouse disconnected the keyboard went unresponsive as well.

I went onto WIDCOMM to download a bluetooth driver. The 1 minute of horrifying bluetooth disconnection seemed to have disappeared. However, the problem of disconnecting once every 5 minutes still persists.

I must say though, bluetooth file transfers worked OK on the Z.

Any one of you have any experiences or thoughts about this?

 

I have had all sorts of problems with BT on my Z. My theory is that the 64bit drivers for the BT chip are crap

My GF has a 2nd Gen P series with the same chip and it doesn't have any bluetooth problems. Sony gave up trying to fix my BT issues, they replaced the Motherboard twice and the BT chip 3 times.

The issue is not the hardware it is the software.

My Microsoft BT keyboard 6000 would drop like every 2 minutes, I used the MS BT dongle for a while and that worked. Then I gave the KB to my GF and got a Sony BT keyboard, that works fine, I get some dropouts maybe once every hour or two (kb and mouse stop for about 15 seconds)

I have NEVER gotten ANY A2DP capable headphones working with the Z. I have old headsets, like the first gen Motorola (5+ years old) but that should not matter. I tried a 3 year old Sony Ericsson BT headset also and it didn't work.

File transfers do work ok but peripherals are are hit or miss and are buggy if they do work.

I know it is a problem with the 64 bit software, the P with the same chip and 32 bit software is perfect. My UX also has no problem with the keyboard and mouse.

One thing that I haven't gotten around to trying is taking the Alps chip form my Gen1 P Series and putting it in the Z. I am not sure if it will fit, I did try to take the Toshiba chip from the UX and put it in the Z but it is a different connector. I know the connector on the 2nd gen P is the same as the Z, I have swapped chips with my girlfriends P and hers still works perfectly and mine is still hit or miss. I am hoping that A: the alps chip will fit in the Z, and B: I can find x64 drivers for it that don't have the same problems as the Brodcom ones.


If this is the solution then it will be easy for others with BT issues to replace the Broadcom chip in the Z with the Alps chip. You can get the chips online for like $20 and it is super easy to pop open the Z and swap it.

I will let you know when I get a chance to pull the Gen1 P and the Z apart to try it. I just haven't found the time yet and my BT mostly works now that I've changed keyboards.

 

Today I actually had a little free time to mess around with this and for the first time in 9 months of owning the Z I have had a little success with getting the bluetooth to do what I want. This morning I actually got A2DP working.

I was looking at my UX and I remembered that I never had any bluetooth issues with it, A2DP works great, tethering works great, all peripheral devices work great. I always thought that it was because of the Alps/Toshiba BT hardware in the UX. It seems that is the answer because no matter what combination of OS / software I used on the UX I never had bluetooth problems. In XP and Vista there was a Toshiba application that took over bluetooth and I didn't have the native OS bluetooth management. I didn't really care because the Toshiba software worked great. 99% of my experience with this was under XP, the UX came with Vista but that lasted about a half and hour and I never put it back on.

Today I got curious, does A2DP still work on the UX? I wondered, so I paired my Moto Headset and in about 10 seconds I was listening to music. So I looked at the driver for bluetooth. I was quite surprised to find that the driver is "Generic Bluetooth Adapter" dated 2006? Then it clicked. I have spent many hours trying different Broadcom/Widcom/Foxcon drivers on the Z1. I downloaded the latest from Sony, got the updater from Broadcom. Problems problems problems. No A2DP ever, certain devices, like keyboards mice or certain combinations caused bluetooth to freeze up as often as every 2 minutes for about 15 seconds at a time. I also was never able to tether with my Windows Mobile 6.5 phone (don't have that anymore but whatever)

So I went to the device manager on the Z, clicked on "FOXCON23947129347" whatever it was and clicked update drivers, then choose, then select from list, clicked on "Generic Bluetooth Adapter" and restarted. Then I paired my Moto headset and it worked!

I have attached a screenshot.

So the next thing to do is trade keyboards with my girlfriend and see if this old generic driver fixes the problem with the Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard 6000. I actually like the Sony Bluetooth Keyboard a little better but I am really curious to see if the keyboard that gave me so many headaches for so long actually works. I suspect it does.

@ the OP, why don't you try installing the generic bluetooth drivers and see if your problems go away.

 

I used the Microsoft Keyboard with my Z and the Generic Bluetooth drivers for a couple hours, no dropouts no problems.

I also decided to see if the A2DP would work on my first gen P, I didn't work, so I tried the generic drivers trick, that didn't work, so I got the latest drivers from the Sony support site and that also didn't work. I then ran the Broadcom driver updater and now it does work.

I find this really strange. The drivers that work on the P are the ones that don't work at all on the Z. I still hold the theory that it is the difference between 32bit and 64bit drivers.

Whatever, I have flawless Bluetooth on all of these cool little computers without any hardware mods. I am happy.

 

Bluetooth on my Z stopped working today for no apparent reason and nothing I have tried to troubleshoot it has worked - HELP!

I have never had any BT problems with my Z118GX , at least not since the first week I owned it. I use it extensively and had 7 devices paired and really depend on it. I've retraced steps, done restores to last good restore point, etc, to no avail! I've now uninstalled all the BT drivers that I had installed - and, which together had produced PERFECT BT performance on all devices and then incrementally installed:

1) the Broadcom Bluetooth driver from the Sony page for my model
2) the Broadcom BT UPDATE " " " etc
3) a Thinkpad Bluetooth with Enhanced Data Rate driver (which I had installed at one point in the past because of a recommendation I'd gotten when I first got my Z, and which I believe was what caused this Z's BT to work perfectly ever since, before today!

yada, yada, yada.

EDIT: Since I posted this, I have discovered that many of my Sony drivers/software are borked, and it all happened at the same time and for no cause I can figure out. Anyway, I started a broader thread on all of those issues:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/622466-help-z11-drivers-sftwe-all-went-nutso.html#post8047779