Bluetooth on Laptops with Windows 2008
I was informed via Ishai’s blog that he has been able to find and implement the solution here to get his Bluetooth to work on Windows 2008 with hyper-V installed. Since I only use x64 Windows Server operating systems on my laptops (for the same reasons he does), I have been desprately looking to find a fix to enable Bluetooth feature on my lovely ThinkPad T61P as well.
I read through the fix and looks like there is a catch for x64 users!
Getting your Bluetooth device using WIDCOMM 5.1 drivers and patcher requires you to select “Disable Driver Signing Enforcement” EVERY time you boot (from F8 Menu) right after your BIOS post; otherwise Windows marks the driver improper and stops it from being loaded.
Windows with the hypervisor enabled doesn’t allow you to sleep or hibernate the laptop, so pressing F8 every time your computer boots up is a MAJOR bummer, then again at least this way you have an option! Better than nothing, eh?
Update March/01/09: Fellow MVP, Ben Curry pointed me to this installer (Ready Driver Plus) which takes care of the manual step. It works for me! Install, reboot, and enjoy No more driver enforcement 🙂 . I’m all for increased security (Disable Driver Signing Enforcement is NOT a good security practice ), but I guess , for now, I am going to live without it until I find a better solution. As always , please try this at your own risk!
Yea, its weird that we had to do it this way though, Ishai and I have the same laptops and we both had the bluetooth working fine (using a slightly different hacked up driver) but we both did rebuilds and after that it just wouldn’t work! Was so happy to see him figure that one out 🙂
Stop the Driver Signing Check: There’s been lots of attempts, but no permanent fix unfortunately since SP1 (It’s part of Microsoft’s Trustworthy computing strategy, however it’s sooooo easy to register a company, then get an official signing certificate – all it does is gives MS a switch to “turn Off” Malware signed drivers).
However… I may be able to help you with Hyper-V – here’s how to switch it on and off (From Mark Harrison’s Blog)
You can have Hyper-V installed but not started by the following registry setting:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hvboot]”Start”=dword:00000003
Now, when I start my laptop i have full access to the power management fucntionality.
If I need to demo a VM, I can start Hyper-V with the command
net start hvboot
Power management is then disabled again until the next reboot.
Cheers!
Brad