Dell Bluetooth on Windows 7

A lot of issues have popped up concerning the Dell laptop Bluetooth module on Windows 7. Some laptops, such as the D630, seem to work out of the box. Others, such as the D620, do not. Some people blame Dell for not rolling out new drivers, other blame Microsoft for not pushing fresh drivers through Windows Update.

Many fix-it ideas are floating out there, but a simple approach has worked for me:

Go to the Dell site and install the Windows XP 64-bit drivers for your particular model - you ARE running 64-bit, aren't you? This should get things functional. But you may still notice timeout and sync issues.

To solve this, go to Device Manager. Open the Properties for the Dell Wireless 3x0 Bluetooth Module. On the Power Management tab, uncheck "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"

That should get you production ready until Dell (or Microsoft) rolls out fresh drivers for these modules.

Areca Backup on 64-bit Windows

Areca is an excellent open source cross platform backup utility. Combine it with an FTPS server and you have a secure, available anywhere backup system. In other words, your own free cloud backup solution.

However, Areca does not officially support 64-bit operating systems. This does NOT mean, however, that you can not run Areca on a 64-bit system.

First, even with 64-bit Java runtime installed, Areca will not see that java is there.
The solution is to install the x86 version of Java.

Next, when launching, you will get the dreaded "msvcr71.dll not found" error.

The solution is to do a search for the mscr71.dll on your system. It is there, especially if you have Office installed. If you can't find it, you need to enable "Show system files" in the folder and search properties.

Copy this file into C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and everything should work.

I hope one day the Areca folks will create a 64-bit build. But until then, this is an easy work around to enable 32-bit Areca on your system.