Steam Deck: Can't Install Bluetooth and Audio Drivers in Windows 11 [with solution]

[Ben Bernanke]

I installed Windows 11 on my Steam Deck today and downloaded the drivers from the official link that Steam provided:

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BAA8

I followed the instructions to install some of the drivers and it worked fine. But audio and Bluetooth did not install as instructed. But I got them working (instructions below).


Summary of Solution
Unzip your driver downloads. The device manager can't navigate to the driver folder if it's zipped. You can also copy the unzipped path to clipboard and paste it into the device manager's path.

Go into windows device manager and then find the "other devices" group. Go through each of the "unknown devices" in there and right click and select install driver. Then navigate to or paste the full path of the 1st audio driver (probably in your downloads folder) and hit enter. And try to update the driver for each of them. It will eventually work for one of them. Do the same thing for the 2nd audio driver.
I started at the bottom of the list and worked up and it found them faster.

For bluetooth, go to the bluetooth group and expand it and then do the same thing for the device that has "Realtek" in the name (actually it now says "generic" and when you install the driver it changes to "Realtek".

When you're successful, you'll find 5 new audio devices under the audio group.

The deck internal speakers, headphone jack, and bluetooth headphone are all working. I did not test the microphone.


Why the official instructions didn't work for me
The two audio drivers are not .exe files but .inf (I think). The instructions say that you can right-click the .inf file and it the menu will show an "install" option. I could not get that option to come up. There may be some setting that I can change in Windows to fix this, but I don't know what it is.

Here are detailed steps on how to do deal with the Windows Device manager and get folder paths if you don't know how to do that (probably too much detail for many people):


Audio Driver Install
1. click "Start" (windows icon on left side of task bar at the bottom of the desktop)

2. at the top of the start menu, there is a field that says "type here to search"

3. Type "device manager" in that field. The device manager should open.

4. A window should open with a long list of devices are nested under "deck"

5. scroll down until you find the one called "other devices"

6. expand that to find a bunch of "unknown devices"

7. select each one in order and right-click them and select "update driver"

8. select "Browse my computer for drivers"

9. In a separate window, find where you downloaded the drivers and extract them so they aren't zips anymore.

10. Navigate to the unzipped folder that contains your driver and copy its path to your clipboard. To get the folders path, right click it and look under properties or change your folder settings (3 bars in upper right corner of file explorer and select the "display full path in bar" option an copy from there). There is also an option on the right-click menu that says "copy as path" which worked for me.

11. Go back to the window device manager opened ("it's called update drivers-unknown device" )and paste the path to the folder containing your driver into the field next to the "Browse" Button. (I keep the "include subfolders" option checkbox checked).

12. Hit "next" (ignore the button at the bottom that says "let me pick form a list of available drivers on my computer. That will search a driver path that Windows stores for drivers it downloads automatically that you probably don't have your downloaded drivers in).

13. Then hit next. Installing the driver will fail for most of them, you have to go down the entire list of unknown devices until you find the device it works for. On mine it was the last or second-to-last listed device, but your OS might sort them differently so just try them all in order (maybe start from the bottom).

14. When you finally find the unlisted device that will accept the driver, if you look in the device manager list of devices, under the "audio" option, it can now be expanded (mine was not able to be expanded previously) and there are 4 devices there that were not there before.

15. At this point I restarted, but I'm not sure if that's necessary. I got back into device driver and verified that the new devices under "audio" were still there.

16. I then installed the second driver by following the same steps. (the instructions on the steam page say that you have to install 1 audio driver first and the other driver 2nd so the above steps all applied to the first driver and now I'm doing the 2nd one the same way). Try to install the driver for the "unknown devices" again (same list as last time). Don't go under "audio" and try to install it to the new devices.

17. I restarted a 2nd time after installing the 2nd audio driver.

18. When I was done there were still many unrecognized devices in the device manager but my audio worked.


Bluetooth Driver Installation
To install the bluetooth driver, do the same thing as for the audio, but the device for me was already discovered and listed in Device Manager after I expanded the "bluetooth" devices item. It is the device that says "Realtek" in the name (apparently windows installs a driver for this that driver isn't good/doesn't work). I think this step was necessary but maybe the bluetooth worked fine after the audio drivers installed and I just didn't test it, so maybe you don't have to do this, idk.

Other Stuff
I'm not an audiophile and I can't comment on the quality of the audio. The speakers seem a little quiet, if anything.

Here are other details if you're interested:
Steam Deck: Post Q3

Windows:
Edition: Windows 11 Pro
Version: 22H2
Installed: 12.10.22
OS build: 22621.900
Experience: Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.22638.1000.0

I just installed and windows and went through all the updates. I didn't tweak any settings.
BTW I'm very impressed with the performance of Windows on the deck, it's very responsive, but the overall experience was better with Steam OS.

Ben Bernanke Windows 11 Driver Install