Hurrah for Belkin

Last year, I bought a Belkin bluetooth USB dongle for my Asterisk box (if my mobile is in range, I’m at home), and for the occasional use on my Windows PC for syncing contacts to the phone.  It never worked right, and I attributed it to the Linux BT stack, the USB 1.1 port on my laptop and my aging Windows XP installation.  I picked it out of my bits box last week, and tried to get it running on the shiny new Windows box with decent USB ports.

Nada.  Every time I tried to discover other BT devices, Windows would swear blind that the dongle refused to scan – supported by the BT light going off, indicating that it had shut down.  So, off to the Internet, and I found a site saying that there was a known bad batch of Belkin dongles, and that Belkin would replace them.

So, off to Belkin’s site, and find the contact form.  Fill in the details, mentioning I really have no clue where I got the device, but it was in 2006, and according to a site on the ‘net, my dongle was probably from a bad batch.  The response from the form told me that I’d hear back from a Belkin rep in the next few days.

Fast forward to today.  No response from a Belkin rep, but along with my two 500 GB drives was another package – a shiny replacement for the bad dongle, shipped straight from Belkin!  Works like a charm, no more cable required to talk to the sync app, and it’s just as fast as the cable.