Missives from the 6th Floor

The Asus shipped with the Toshiba Bluetooth stack for windows. I suppose, in retrospect, the fact that there are several Bluetooth stacks available should have been a warning...

While I could pair the device just fine, when it came time to "dial" it would eventually come back with an error code about the modem not responding. The Treo was awake, and listening to Bluetooth, but no dice.

So, I downloaded the latest Toshiba stack made available by Asus, which required removing the old one (losing pairing data) a reboot for good measure, and installing the new one.

Same symptom.

Ok, several folks had reported better success with the Microsoft stack, so I removed the Toshiba software, edited the .inf file to add the right hardware device identifier (yea, we're already off the rails) and let windows detect and install the device.

Now I couldn't even use the dial-up-networking service on the Treo - I just got "access denied."

A note to other developers - if you're not going to make useful, informative dialogs, just pop one up that says "the guy who wrote this is too lazy to do anything that might help you figure out the problem, so you're basically fucked." No logging, no way to pass go or collect my $200.

A smart person would have stopped there, but noooo...

So I "found" a copy of the Widcomm/Broadcom stack and after several experiments, over the span of three uninstall/reinstalls (with associated reboots, of course), I managed to get it working.

Elapsed time: several hours.

And I have very little confidence that it will still work the next time I try to use it.

I'd be willing to bet this would have been easier on Linux.

Oh, and Toshiba, for god's sake, hire someone with a clue about user interface design.