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September 18th, 2013 20:00

Help turning on Dell 380 BT 4.0 Adapter so can install drivers in Win 8

I am in desperate need of some help in turning on (enabling) my Dell 380 Bluetooth 4.0 adapter on my Latitude e6430 running Windows 8. In PC Settings from the Charms menu Bluetooth is greyed out, and it was hidden in Device Manager and greyed out. When I tried installing the Broadcom driver (both from Dell and from Broadcom) I received an error stating I needed to turn on the BT adapter. Wireless switch is on, and I double checked the BIOS and it is on. I even removed BT from the list that the wireless switch controls in the BIOS. My last step was to follow the suggestion to uninstall BT from Device Manager and uninstall Widcom and restart the computer. Drivers still give the same error, and now BT is completely removed from Device Manager. I have tried everything including device manager, bttray etc., airplane switch, checking the running services, and much more. After all of this the only thing I think might be causing this is prior to when Dell installed Windows 8 the adapter had been set to off using wireless control software. Since windows 8 does not support Dell's control point and Fn+Fkey to enable BT, I suspect the only option is to try to turn BT on via the Registry, restart, and hopefully the adapter will then be recognized and the drivers can install. This is a new laptop (2 weeks) and I am sure it includes the Dell 380 BT adapter and it should be functional. Does anyone know of a way to turn on or enable the BT adapter in the registry? I am certain in has something to do with a last-state value being set to "off" or "disabled" and it is just a matter of finding the correct registry keys and correct entry to change. Either that or software that is compatible with Windows 8 that adds a Fn+Fkey function to toggle BT on and off or other run command. I welcome any help the community can give, and its possible this may be the source of problems others have had with enable BT on windows 8 (especially after an upgrade if they forget to enable BT BEFORE the upgrade).

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