How to add Bluetooth support to AO 722?

Bought an Acer Aspire One AO722 netbook from Target early this week. It is pretty complete but no bluetooth support. What pci-e card should I buy to get BT?
TIA.

 

theres no slot inside the 722 to take a card, i think you'll need to look for a usb solution

 

Both Intel and Broadcom make mini PCI-e cards with both 802.11 b/g/n and bluetooth on one card. Just don't know which one to get.

 

I didnt think of that, providing it will fit and doesnt need extra wires for the antenna id go with broadcom my 722 has the broadcom for wireless now.

 

On my WiFi pci-e card, there are two wires and I assume they are going to the antennas. On the WiFi/Bluetooth combo card, they also have two connectors. Does bluetooth "shares" the antennas with WiFi?

 

Bluetooth and 802.11 B/G use the same frequency band (2.4 GHz ISM band), hence they can share the same antennas if it is a single device solution like above.

DutchDK

 

Right, when I opened up my 722 (the Target C50 one), I saw not one, but two PCIe sockets, while one is occupied by a WiFi card, and the other one empty. So may be I was dreaming about it, or got hypnotized by Acer subliminal screen saver.

You want me to post a picture for you?

 

I went for a different approach. I am using an ASUS USB-BT211 Mini Bluetooth Dongle USB 2.0
The Bluetooth headphones sound good in stereo. It works and knows when my bluetooth devices are nearby and turned on.
This was an inexpensive and non-technical installation.

 

I decided I wanted integrated Bluetooth. Since the chipset used for the original wireless WiFi is Atheros, I decided I should find an Atheros solution to thwart off any possibility of compatibility problems. A search on the internet for mini PCIe Atheros came up with some listings on Ebay. The one I settled on is an Atheros AR5B195 Wireless + Bluetooth Half Mini PCI-E Card for $21 including shipping.

It arrived a few days ago and I installed it. It was a very simple procedure to remove the existing wireless card (open the case, pop off the antennae leads, remove the hold down screw) Reverse the procedure to install the new card. The new card also has two antennae connections. WiFi and Bluetooth share the antennae.

Two sets of drivers are needed. The Atheros Bluetooth drivers can be found on the Acer Aspire One AO722 drivers section. The Atheros WiFi drivers were a bit hard to find. I tried several different ones before I had success. The successful driver was a Dell DW1702 wireless card driver. R301705.exe. The driver did not want to initially install probably because the driver package was looking for a Dell machine. So what I did was go to the device manager, pick the network device not working (our new Atheros card) and install the driver by hand by pointing to the Dell driver directory. Voila, the driver installed. As soon as the driver was installed, wireless was again available.

Everything appears to be working fine. I can now use a Bluetooth mouse without a dongle!

 

Your research paid off, well done.

My AO722 came with integral Bluetooth (I'm in Thailand) and I have a Bluetooth mouse. The only ''niggle' I have is that I need to start Bluetooth manually, through Launch Manager, and have been unable to persuade it to launch at Windows startup. I wonder if you have been able to achieve this, though I'm beginning to think it's a 'feature' designed to conserve the battery?

 

For me the Bluetooth comes on automatically after Windows 7 boots.

There are a couple of entries in HKLM\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVerion\Run

AthBtTray "C:\Program Files (x86)\Bluetooth Suite\AthBtTray.exe"
AtherosBtStack "C:\Program Files (x86)\Bluetooth Suite\BtvStack.exe"

 

Hello There..

I've recently picked up AO 722, with C-60.. I would like to pickup an Wi-Fi card with BT and Dual-Band capabilities and came across with 2 options. Intel 6230, and Atheos AR5B195 . Before i pull the plug on the WiFi module, i wanted to ask whether there was any WHITELIST on the bios?..If so, what are some of the approved devices?

EDIT: Seems like ATheos AR5B195 is a single band WiFi.. i need dual band + BT.. :|.. Intel is the only option here. Just gotta be sure whether there is a whitelist or not..

 

So doing a bit research reveals Acer does have a whitelist on their BIOS.. sigh..