Windows – Reset Bluetooth Components Without Having to Reboot

bluetoothpowershellwindows 7

Sometimes the bluetooth on my laptop fails to connect properly (either not at all, or sometimes with terrible quality) to a pair of stereo headphones. Often times I've been able to recover normal functionality by resetting the bluetooth adapter.

However, that doesn't always work. That leads me to take other measures, like restarting the bluetooth services in Windows. This never seems to get anywhere and ultimately I end up rebooting my system and everything works again.

I really don't think rebooting should be necessary to resolve this, and so I'd like to know: Could anyone else suggest some ideas of what other devices / services / processes in Windows might be worth attempting to reset / restart in order to restore proper functionality of the bluetooth device?

Ultimately I'd like to just write a .ps1 script that I could run whenever this thing acts up, but please don't hesitate to answer just because you may not work with PowerShell.

Extra Details:

The specific services I've tried resetting are:

  • Bluetooth Service (\Program Files\ThinkPad\Bluetooth Software\btwdins.exe)
  • Bluetooth Support Service (\Windows\system32\svchost.exe -k bthsvcs)

My laptop is a Lenovo T61p with a Broadcom Bluetooth Adapter.

Best Answer

Try something like the following using an Administrative PowerShell prompt. You can't restart services as a regular user.

Get-Service -DisplayName *Bluetooth* | Restart-Service

If this works, you may want to throw the that snippet into a ps1 file and set up ps1 files to be "Run as Admin," this link may help you with that: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-run-as-administrator-to-any-file-type-in-windows-vista/

Hope this helps!

(Adding * in front of Bluetooth* solved my issue with an intel chip.)

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