Code 43
May 3rd 2008Wallabynerd alert & rants
New laptop has a bluetooth adapter built-in. Came with a bluetooth mouse. Natural enough to use the mouse with the laptop… and it works pretty well, overall, although it’s a tiny bit jerky sometimes.
Of course, it’s not quite so simple, since the laptop is running Windows (for now). Specifically, sometimes – only sometimes – when Windows goes to sleep, it’ll forget how to handle the bluetooth stuff, and so it wakes up with a “Code 43″ error that disables Bluetooth entirely. That’s mildly frustrating.
(The solution, if you’re here looking for it, seems to be to go to the Device Manager, disable the BT device, wait a moment, then re-enable it. Supposedly Vista SP1 includes the hotfix, but I’m still seeing this problem after SP1 is (supposedly) installed, so either I’ve got a different issue or the fix isn’t so hot after all.)
What’s more frustrating still is that the touchpad has no buttons to switch it on or off – rather, there’s an option in software to “automatically disable” the touchpad when an external mouse is connected. Great!
Now, you might think, like I did, that that would naturally mean it would “automatically re-enable” the touchpad when an external mouse is not available. No, that’d make it too simple – you have to get to the settings panel and click to disable the “automatically disable” option, which does turn the touchpad back on. Of course, you have to do that without the mouse – so sooner or later the alt-key shortcuts to do all that will become second nature, but until then it’s very frustrating.
If only I could decide whether it’ll be better to run Windows within Linux, or Linux within Windows…
