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Audio Technology

Fixing Bluetooth problem with TP-Link UB400

I recently bought myself some Sony Bluetooth earbuds for my phone, but I was keen to see if I could connect them to my PC too – so that I could use them in conference calls, for example.

But my computer didn’t have Bluetooth. So I bought TP-Link UB400 Bluetooth Adaptor online, because I’ve used and liked their stuff before. But when I plugged it in it didn’t work! Windows 10 kept telling me I didn’t have Bluetooth installed.

I went to the TP-Link FAQ for the UB400 – but nothing they suggested worked.

After a bit of Googling, I went to the Windows Device Manager, looked at the Universal Serial Bus controllers, and disappeared down a rabbit hole trying to fix the “Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed)” problem.

And only then did I go to the “CSR Bluecore Bluetooth” driver that also appeared on the list of Universal Serial Bus controllers when I plugged in the dongle. As an experiment:

  1. I right-clicked “CSR Bluecore Bluetooth and selected “Update driver”
  2. Clicked on “Browse my computer for driver software”
  3. Clicked on “Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer”
  4. Picked “Generic Bluetooth Adaptor” in place of “CSR Bluecore Bluetooth”
  5. Clicked “next”

and suddenly everything worked!

So that’s my solution! I hope it works for you too.

68 replies on “Fixing Bluetooth problem with TP-Link UB400”

Man, you are the best!
I installed the official CSR drivers from TP Link site but it stuttered badly.
You saved me from an endless search how to correct it.

Just remove CSR stack, re-insert the dongle, go to Devices and Update driver – select Generic Bluetooth adapter – Enjoy

Exactly as you described!

Why did I have to search for and find this to make a frustrating problem turn out to be so easy??
Thank you very much for posting this- you’re a star!!

The largest driver on my current PC is 11 MB in size.
Most are under 1 MB, and many are 100K or less.

Being told we have to download a “driver” file that’s 40 times the biggest verified driver, and disable any existing Bluetooth device, and bypass the firewall and virus detection software is a tell.

Conclusion: There’s no way that the TP-Link package contains just a Bluetooth driver.

Whether the rest is bloatware or malware doesn’t matter. I’m not touching it. Always be suspicious of conspicuously large files that don’t offer *very* complex functionality, or have much smaller substitutes.

Max’s solution (with tweaks for my installation) worked. Fortunately, I wasted no time on TP-Link’s recommended approach once I saw the download’s filesize.

This website helped me to find another page, with a solution that worked: https://community.tp-link.com/us/home/forum/topic/183610?sortDir=ASC&page=2.

Quoting what worked: Add or remove program and remove CSR Bluetooth Harmony Stack, then scan for hardware changes in device manager and suddenly everything started appearing again. Also check, ctrl + r, type services.msc and see if BluetoothSupportService is running otherwise restart the service and reboot. Hope this helps.

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