Acer Aspite V5 bluetooth/Windows 8.1 won't work

PJay

My partner has an Aspire V5 laptop running Windows 8.1. Everything seems to work well except for Bluetooth. The unit has a Qualcomm Atheros chip and we have the latest 8.1 drivers installed from the Acer site. All the drivers show in device manager as installed and working and Bluetooth is on (via the Charm/PC Settings) but the laptop never discovers any Bluetooth devices.

 

She had a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse which we're trying to pair with the laptop and I've tried all sorts of workarounds found on the internet (this seems to be a well known issue) but with absolutely no luck. The same mouse is detected in seconds on my Windows 8.1 desktop system using a cheap usb Bluetooth adapter and the default Windows drivers.

 

I could of course but a usb Bluetooth adapter for the Aspire but the whole point of going Bluetooth was to avoid using a usb port.

 

The wireless side of the Qualcomm adapter seems to work flawlessly.

 

Any ideas would be gratefully accepted as, after hours of trying, I'm completely stuck.

PJay

.... but a bog standard off-the-shelf generic usb Bluetooth adapter works instantly with the built-in Windows 8.1 drivers; how can Acer get it so wrong?