I had a sud­den com­pul­sion to make my BH-501 work at last with Win­dows after one too many late-night “I can’t use speak­ers and can no longer abide cables for crappy ear­phones” moments. If I had money enough to blow $200 on a decent set of head­phones expressly for the pur­pose of sit­ting at the PC late at night, sure, but I don’t at the minute. So my mobile’s Blue­tooth head­phones do a decent job in the time being.

The mag­i­cal secret, it seems, is Bluesoleil’s free EDR Blue­tooth man­ager soft­ware that allegedly has a 20MB data trans­fer lim­i­ta­tion per ses­sion until it’s pur­chased, but I’ve just down­loaded it and done over 50MB of audio data trans­fers in A2DP streams and it’s not com­plain­ing. Plus, Buy/Register under the Help menu are greyed out… so I don’t know quite how seri­ous they are about sell­ing this thing.

At any rate, it’s work­ing great for me, though my crappy Blue­tooth don­gle slows EVERYTHING about this com­puter down… must try another one, it’s not A2DP’s fault because when­ever I pair my mobile with it to sync the same thing hap­pens — even when nothing’s paired, as soon as you plug the don­gle in (USB) every­thing starts crawling.

All that said, BlueSoleil are great. Works well.