Kensington K33902US, Works but with a HUGE..

Overall Rating3.333.333.333.333.33

Works but with a HUGE problem

The unit works well with any devices that I personally have paired it with ie. cell phones, headsets, stereo headsets, and another computer.

However, when the radio is on when you turn the computer on, there are 2 processes TOSOBEX.EX and SERVICES.EXE that will take up most if not all your CPU cycle. This slows down the computer very much. This happens even when there are no devices paired with the unit.

I have installed the unit on 2 other machines with the same results. So, somehow the Toshiba Stack that comes with this unit takes up CPU cycles when the bluetooth radio is turned on. This happens on my laptop and 2 desktops.

Once those services are on, there is no way to turn it off except to reboot the machine. However, PRIOR to rebooting the machine, TURN the bluetooth radio off first. That way when the computer is rebooted, those services will not be on.

The one workaround that I did was to RENAME the TOSOBEX.EXE file to something else like BAD_TOSOBEX.EXE_BAD. That way it won’t get invoked when you turn the bluetooth radio on. That means that you WILL NOT have OBEX capability.

Kensington Techincal Support so far has been USELESS. But, I’m still trying to get to people there who actually know what they are talking about.

Also, on the cosmetic side, the unit has VERY SHARP corners. Be careful when you are handling your laptop (if you are using it on a laptop); I have been scratched multiple times by its corners.

Update (9/9/2010): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen. I also found some auctions for this item here.

The featured review for this product, Kensington K33902US Bluetooth USB Micro Adapter Electronics, was written by PNS.

The average rating for this item is 3.3 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.

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Reviews (3)

Jim Moore

April 10th, 2010 at 1:42 am    


Overall Rating55555

Flawless
This device works as advertised for my purpose, which is to connect my Samsung Hue via BitPim. I’ve used the adapter on two systems (both running XP SP3), and it works flawlessly, installing the native XP drivers (no need to install the much more resource-intensive application that ships with the adapter). No hassle at all: switch on the Hue’s Bluetooth discovery mode, switch the PC Connection setting to Bluetooth, and the devices communicate without a problem. Then, when you’re not using it, just disable the radio in the device manager. In neither case (on my desktop nor laptop) did the native XP Bluetooth drivers consume unreasonable resources. It just works.


Daniel Feygin

April 15th, 2010 at 11:43 am    


Overall Rating33333

Toshiba BT stack is a liability
I have no problem with the hardware, but the Toshiba drivers that come with the device significantly limit its capabilities. Some parts of the software, like Skype integration, are over-engineered. As a result, I could not get Skype to work with this product (perhaps a compatibility issue with the latest Skype release, but I could not find a compatible version or one that was not recognized by Toshiba’s drivers — should have worked fine if the drivers just didn’t try to do anything special). There are other peculiarities, like having to forever use the same USB port as the one used during the installation.

I highly recommend considering a similar device based on a Broadcom chipset (sometimes referred to as coming with WIDCOMM drivers).


PNS

May 1st, 2010 at 7:19 am    


Overall Rating22222

Works but with a HUGE problem
Rated 2 stars.


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