Windows XP SP2 Bluetooth PAN ICS-or why the Windows XP SP2 bluetooth stack is a joke

A few of you may still be able to recall how we covered the Windows XP SP2 bluetooth stack a few months ago. it scored a prety decent rating back then, but beeing perfectly honest, it has disappointed me ever since.

The latest disappointment was Internet connection Sharing, or ICS in short. As you may already know, I use an Acer Aspire 5620 for a few days now,. and wanted to give it wireless internet access via a PC with a bluetooth dongle. And indeed, the PAN worked just finem, and both boxen could see one another.

But this is where the party started. It simply was not possible to enable ICS on the server-Windows simply didnt display the check box in the bluetooth PAN network settings page. In fact, if the other dongle wouldnt be running on IVT BlueSoleil, it probably wouldnt have worked at all.

If you now add in that you need to tell the Microsoft Bluetooth stack explicitly whenever you want to receive a file(and need to inform it once per file(!!!)), the Microsoft Bluetooth stack looks like a puny joke rather than a full replacement for a third-party stack like WidComm or IVT blueSoleil.

What do you think? BTW, I now exchanged the dongles and stacks, so lets see if ICS wil now work!

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4. Carrier influences-why bluetooth gets crippled
5. No direct Windows Vista upgrades for Windows 2000 or Microsoft goes bonkers