A-HA!

Finally found my backup* Bluetooth dongle and, with it installed, was able to make my Treo 755p synch with Palm Desktop under Windows 7 x64.
Which means I’m partway to a solution to now upgrade my laptop to Windows 7. Unfortunately my Dell Precision M4300 has a built-in Bluetooth interface that damn near nothing (and certainly not any extant version of Palm Desktop that I’ve tried) works with, and which is for that reason disabled. And Palm in its infinite wisdom has refused to create 64-bit USB drivers for the Palm Treo series of phones…which, given that the line is discontinued, probably makes a certain amount of sense, but is annoying nonetheless, because I plan to keep using/amortizing this phone for at least another couple of years.
Thus the need for working Bluetooth, and thus, the dongle.
The only problem left with the phone is that PDANet won’t install under Windows 7 x64 — possibly because of the lack of an installed Palm driver — so I’m working on installing Windows XP Mode to see if I can run it that way.
So far I haven’t found anything else I already own that doesn’t work with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate. Crossing my fingers that I won’t have any further problems…because the laptop is really a testbed for my next desktop workstation 🙂
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* You may ask, “So does that mean you have two of them? Why didn’t you use the primary, then?” And I will answer, “Because the primary is connected to my desktop machine, which doesn’t have an internal Bluetooth radio.” And you will respond, “Ahh.”