Small Success

With my current problem getting my phone tethered to the Acer, I suspect that I've introduced a little too much complexity into my setup. When it installed my Belkin bluetooth adaptor originally, I installed the drivers that came with it on the disc. I later discovered that this adaptor was not supported directly by Centrafuse/BlueSoleil and I needed to hack some .ini/.inf files to make it work. In addition, I had installed a stand-alone driver for the N95 8GB before installing and updating the full Nokia PC Suite and mesing about with various configurations. I had also installed and removed some other bits of sotware to test and had turned off some windows services to save on resources and speed up the laptop.

I figured something was messed up there and any one or combination of the above factors could be causing problems. So, I backed up my driver & centrafuse demo downloads to a USB key and reinstalled windows and all the software. Before installing Centrafuse or any bluetooth, I got the phone working as a modem. This time, it worked straight away.

Having installed Centrafuse and configured bluetooth on top of that, everything now works. My phone connects to Centrafuse via bluetooth for hands free calls AND acts as a modem via USB cable connection.

The next step is to see if I can get the phone working as modem via bluetooth as well which would let me eliminate one cable (usb connection from laptop to phone. However, this is not such a big deal as I came across this Nokia n95 8gb docking cradle that will charge the phone, connect it to the laptop via usb and provide an additional USB port, this might work a lot better than a conventional car phone cradle. (Interestingly, the N95 cannot be charged via usb).

Anyway, the correct installation procedure is;

• Install Windows XP
• Install SP2 Update
• Install WiFi dongle & software
• Install Nokia PC Suite & configure N95 as modem via USB
• Set up Nokia as modem in Windows modem set-up
• Install Centrafuse
• Install Belkin Bluetooth dongle & configure BlueSoeil to recognise it
• Set Up & confirm connectivity to N95 in Bluesoeil
• Restart
• Open Centrafuse and configure Phone and Internet settings