Bluetooth doesn't turn off during sleep in Windows 7

Question

I have a Bluetooth USB dongle on a Windows 7 laptop. I did not install any Bluetooth drivers, so I assume that the device is using the Microsoft stack.

When the computer goes to sleep, the Bluetooth adapter stays on. I don't want Bluetooth devices to wake the computer, so I want sleep to turn off the dongle, but I can't find power management options for Bluetooth in the Control Panel and Device Manager.

I also have an issue where the computer doesn't reach full sleep mode. I'm hoping that turning Bluetooth off will solve that problem, too.

How can I turn off Bluetooth during sleep?

Answer 1

I just read this blog post from The Old New Thing the other day.

It talks about the new features in the powercfg utility. I'm not sure if this will help you or not but you can use:

powercfg /energy to "analyze your computer's power consumption and report on things like devices that prevent the computer from sleeping, devices which won't suspend, and processes which are increasing your battery drain."

powercfg /requests to "report on why your computer can't go to sleep, for example, because it has open files on the network, or because the clown will eat it."

Answer 2

It could just be that the Bluetooth adaptor does not support going to sleep when the rest of the machine does, or only supports this if you install specific drivers rather than relying on generic ones.

It might be worth checking your power management and USB settings, both in Windows and the machine's BIOS setup options - there may be an option to remove power from the USB ports when the machine drops into sleep mode.

Answer 3

I had the same problem with the D-link DBT-120 dongle. I went to the D-link website and got the 64-bit Vista drivers made by Toshiba (even though I have Windows 7). Windows 7 gripes, to be sure, but to date I have had no issues with this driver, AND my dongle turns off when I put the machine to sleep. Even better, it turns back on when I turn the machine back on :-)

If your dongle originally used the Toshiba drivers, I recommend giving this a shot! Open http://www.dlink.com/products/?tab=3&pid=DBT-120&rev=DBT-120_revC, select the Drivers link, and then the 6.30.02 driver.