Poor range with bluetooth

I have an E4200 laptop and have just fitted a Bluetooth 365 module bought from Dell. It all went fine and everthing works except that the range to detect and work with a bluetooth peripheral device is about  4-6 feet. I have tried this with at least 3 bluetooth devices PDAs GPS etc and they are all the same. If my arm gets in between, then the range is down to about 3 feet..

As I said, it works fine, but the poor range makes it impractical. Anyone else have this problem?