Where to find bluetooth options on Vista?

[Dogg Thang]

My (godawful piece of ****) laptop has bluetooth supposedly and I want to link it to my old phone to get my phone photos off but I can't seem to find the bluetooth part of the laptop. In the help (and online searches), it tells me to go to the little LAN icon in the bottom right of the taskbar thingy, turn bluetooth on and then click on the bluetooth icon in the same place.

Well, I do that but that bluetooth icon never appears.

There's a bluetooth light on the laptop that is a solid blue so something is on but I can't get into the options. But there must be another way of finding those bluetooth options if that icon isn't there, right? I mean, that icon just links to somewhere. I thought it would be in the control panel but can't find any mention of bluetooth in there.

Aside from finally accepting my laptop is, and always has been, a dud, has anyone got any ideas?

[mmmonkey]

Are there any Bluetooth devices in Device Manager? Is there an obvious way to get into the BIOS on the laptop when it first starts up - usually on board devices such as Bluetooth, Wifi etc are enabled/disabled in the BIOS - might be worth checking those places

Pete

[Dogg Thang]

Yes, there are three bluetooth devices listed in the Device Manager, all saying they are working properly. As for getting into the BIOS, I'm sure I could find out how to do that. I'll check.

[randombs]

With my old Toshiba, I didn't even know it had Bluetooth until I stumbled upon it by accident around a few months later! When I installed the 'bluetooth stack', suddenly the 'found new hardware' pop-up appeared in the corner of the screen which I thought was really strange, as I expected all the hardware to appear in device manager in the first place (even as an unknown device if the drivers weren't present). I can't check the exact place on Vista as my laptop has XP on it and my desktop has Vista but no bluetooth!

Having said that, the fact you have the bluetooth hardware light on tells me the driver is most likely working fine (and that BT would be enabled in the bios if that's even a setting. My bios doesn't have BT/wifi options). On my Vaio, the wifi and bluetooth lights won't turn on until the drivers are set up properly, even if the switch is set to on.

What make/model laptop is it?