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Background:

My laptop has undergone a serious upgrading and turned into a project for me - part of this upgrade was to

  1. Take the optical drive bay out, install a second HDD and make it a hackintosh
  2. Install a Bluetooth dongle inside the shell and increase it's range so I can stream Bluetooth audio to a speaker from a reasonable distance. I managed to hackintosh successfully and today I had the chance to upgrade the inner Bluetooth system, with the intent to extend it's range (you can read more into it here).

Testing the outcome of my upgrade yielded something interesting. I have a Bluetooth speaker that sits in the kitchen to play audio from, and whilst testing the range in Windows 10, I found that I have to basically sit no longer than 1m away from the receiver for the audio not to be choppy (no improvement). However, it got interesting upon booting into El Capitan and discovering that I could sit a proper 6m away and the audio to be crystal clear(!)

Question:

Could someone please tell me why I am able to get a much greater range out of my Bluetooth dongle in El Capitan compared to Windows 10. Same dongle, same computer - different operating systems. Would it have to something with the default drivers? Or something to do with the communication between devices and packets?

Cheers guys.

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ezra_vdj
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  • It seems very much as though W10 is using the internal BT, not the dongle. Are you sure that this is not the case? – AFH May 09 '16 at 11:59
  • @AFH Certain. Compaq CQ62-358TU has no internal bluetooth, hence why I installed the dongle in the first place. – ezra_vdj May 09 '16 at 12:01
  • Check which transmitter windows is using. Drivers can cause performance difference but not this drastic usually. – Roh_mish May 09 '16 at 13:43
  • I just compared W10 with Ubuntu 15.04 on this laptop, using VLC to play a TV recording on my local network. W10 was much more susceptible to other programs running, eg pressing the Windows key, running Task Manager, etc, and the effect was more marked when using a BT speaker for the sound track. I conclude from this that the Windows driver uses more resources, competing with VLC, though I didn't check the effect of moving the speaker away. – AFH May 09 '16 at 15:07
  • @AFH Today I installed the dongle's drivers that it came with, instead of utilising the default Win10 ones, and found the improvement I was looking for! Turns out the designated drivers give the dongle much more power. The reason I didn't use the dongle's original drivers in the first place was due it being a whole interface, compared to the nice integrated one Windows 10 provides, the problem I had in [this question](http://superuser.com/questions/1017867/make-windows-10-recognize-bluetooth-dongle-as-bluetooth) (if you wanna give it that answer I'll accept it) - same with this one. – ezra_vdj May 10 '16 at 07:05
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    I shan't give your answer: you found the solution yourself. It is perfectly valid to answer your own question and accept it, so that others with similar problems can find it. – AFH May 10 '16 at 11:06

1 Answers1

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Through research and experimentation, I have come to discover two main things:

1. The range issue is to do with current output, not whether the voltage is 5V or not.

2. Different OS' regulate the current output from the USB ports differently. I decided to install the stock CSR drivers for the dongle and noticed a huge improvement in range - which makes sense, range which was similar to that of the hackintosh's. Discussing with my friend about my range dilemma brought him to say that OSX, unless specified with drivers, would not be regulating the current output to the dongle, feeding it as much as it draws and would end up killing it - to my surprise did end up killing it.

So there's two things I hope you've learned from my experience.

ezra_vdj
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