Nice to See Windows Never Changes
So, I haven’t been a regular Windows user in 2 decades. My son told me his laptop was ill. He was playing Minecraft and had a hard crash. After recovering from the crash he noticed his bluetooth headphones wouldn’t connect.
He’s pretty good at troubleshooting and figured out that the crash was due to running out of free space on his main harddrive. I helped him use WinDirStat to free up a bunch of space.
Oddly enough, there were tens of gigabytes of ancient log files from some Intel
overclocking utility. After finding the files to purge, hit the go button and
was prompted to admin pin for each admin owned file to be deleted, with no way
to exit the loop. Eventually hit the cancel button a thousand times, restarted
the program again as admin and it wiped out the files with further fuss. It
did take a while though; I’m used to linux where you can destroy gigabytes
of data in half a blink with rm.
A few reboots later and bluetooth still wasn’t working. Device manager says, bluetooth controller? 🤷 Argh.
Eventually ended up uninstalling the bluetooth controller device (after figuring out the non-obvious way to run Device Manager as admin user.) Another reboot and windows says “bluetooth? I don’t even see a bluetooth controller at all any more.” 😔
Consulted my pal gemini and it thinks that the story was that when the crash for running out of free space happened, the bluetooth drive was corrupted at and BIOS went into some kind of protective mode that disabled the bluetooth controller hardware entirely.
Suggested remedies were:
- Unplug the laptop and run the battery out. A full drain will reset something in the BIOS and it the disabled device will get turned back on.
- Poke around in BIOS and turn the bluetooth feature back on manually.
I needed to get on to something else so I told son to go with choice #1. He said, “yeah, shouldn’t be more than an hour until it dies.” This is a 5 year old laptop, so that sounds about right.
10 minutes later he tells me that computer said, “You have 5 minutes left” right after being unplugged and actually powered off 1 minute later. He plugged back in and booted up. Surprisingly, it did fix the problem. Windows found the bluetooth controller again and reinstalled the driver.
Sigh. works for me, I guess.