Can no longer browse phone contents via bluetooth connection  

Hi. I used to be able to simply connect my Android 6 phone to this laptop via bluetooth (Qualcomm Atheros Bluetooth 4.0) and access the phone contents in my windows file explorer. But now I can't. What happened is that I have another computer that has Windows 11 and I had to buy a bluetooth dongle (Realtek Bluetooth 5.0) for it to connect to my phone as it did not have bluetooth hardware. I think the problem appeared when I first paired my laptop with my computer (although I don't remember trying to pair them together PRIOR to this issue, but maybe I'm remember wrongly).

Just to be clear, I am ABLE to send/receive files over all my devices via bluetooth, I simply can't see my phone in file explorer. What happens now when I connect my phone (or any other device) is it connects to the audio service of the phone.


If I disconnect this audio service, the phone remains paired and I can still transfer files no problem.

This new bt dongle messed with something on my laptop. I removed and reinstalled the bluetooth driver on my laptop, still the same result. Maybe it's something else completely, like a port misconfiguration, or something obvious and ridiculously easy to fix. I don't even know from here, I'm just guessing. I'm not too savy with these things, I do the best I can with tutorials and stuff.

Here are some relevant (I hope) screenshots of my device manager:



When I installed the bt driver I get a a couple of errors saying that 2 "Bluetooth Peripheral devices" did not install (driver not found) and also that "PCI Data Acquisition and Signal Processing Controller" did not install (driver not found). The "Standard Serial over Bluetooth link (COM8)" used to be one of the Bluetooth peripheral devices but I manually installed a generic driver for it. It didn't do anything. Probably irrelevant information but just providing as much detail as I can.

By the way, I'm of course using Win7 on my laptop. I mention this because I also just found out that Win10 and Win11 don't allow you to browse your phone in explorer via bluetooth, but I'm pretty sure Win7 (and maybe even Win8?) does allow that.

Please help and thank you.

Luigii said:

Thanks ! I tried MyPhoneExplorer and it is a good replacement.

But I would still like to know what happened to my phone in file explorer, why isn't it there anymore ?

The only time I have seen my phone show up in File Explorer is when my phone was connected by a USB cable.

As far as I know this is only possible in Windows 11. It is described in the following blog article.

Ability to access your Android phone in File Explorer begins rolling out to Windows Insiders
Just a moment...

It is not working as expected. I have it enabled but my phone is not showing up in File Explorer.



However, if I set Show mobile device in File Explorer to Off then a box pops up saying phone was removed from File Explorer. If I then select View Local Files...



A File Explorer box pops up allowing me to browse the files on my phone.