I tried to Disable BlueTooth - but it came back?

More specifically, Bluetooth is a kind of wireless connection. It's primarily used for things like connecting your cell phone to your car's audio system or those obnoxious earpieces people wear when they want attention or to give themselves an inner ear disorder because their sense of balance is too good or something. It can also be used for connecting your cell phone to your computer for tethering purposes and connecting to wireless speakers. Bluetooth is basically just a shorter range and lower power version of wifi aimed more at inter-device connectivity.

On a laptop it'll have a negligible effect on battery life. Cell phones will see an appreciable battery drain, but then cell phone batteries are only a tiny fraction of a laptop battery. Windows 8 is the next major step in Microsoft's unification plan for Windows. Windows XP moved everyone onto the same Windows platform, where as in the Win9x/ME days there were two completely different Windows platforms. Now with Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to bring it's mobile house into the fold, so tablets, cell phones, even the Xbox console, all are running the same core OS. That's the plan anyway. That's part of why you see bluetooth being such a big part of Windows 8, it's more for the tablet and cell phone side of things, but laptop makers will toss in bluetooth because it might only add 10-15 cents to the BOM and it's one more bullet-point on the marketing material listing features. In some cases it might be cheaper to add it than not because the added volume of adding a bluetooth chip to every device means the manufacturer can get a better bulk discount which could bring the total cost of parts down for a more expensive device by an amount greater than the increased cost to other devices.

The TL;DR version is don't worry about BT on a desktop or laptop. Most of the time the wifi and BT are on the same card so you can't disable one without disabling the other and the impact on battery life will be negligible.

with Bluetooth both devices put out a signal (example Cell and a Speaker) and the devices have to be recognized
by each other and this process is know as pairing. Once the 2 devices are paired then a connection is made. Typical wireless the devices aren't paired as one device typically a router send a wireless signal out and the device (computer, table or phone) connects top that wireless network through internet connections on the device.

Everything is wired. I supposed at some point I "might" get a new printer or mouse or whatever, but at the moment nothing wireless. Again, I won't be touching Bluetooth after I reinstall everything just thought it was "odd" for the system to automatically reinstall it. Yes its HD, and some of the suggestions I have read to improve operation were to uninstall anything you weren't using, so I uninstalled Bluetooth, as well as others. Disabled some services per Black Viper and uninstalled other stuff in Add & Remove area.

Anyway, thanks for replying

In the past if you tried to disable it in device manager, it would re-enable. The app might be called QuickSet.
Bob

A search on Google implied that that program was on laptops, didn't see any reference to desktops. Again, I went to Start / search / quickset and it returned no hits. Control Panel / Programs didn't list it either. I didn't know that if you disabled something in device manager that it would come back. Hmm. I don't recall ever trying to do "that" in my old windows xp pro. I somethings updated drivers in device manager but that was it. I went to Dell site and it didn't list any suggestions for installing QuickSet. It did review what I had installed.

Again to clarify, I did uninstall BlueTooth from the control panel / programs area. Seems to me that should have been it. And a quick look just now shows that indeed it is not listed. Interesting.

One further point, while there are 9 "successful" installations of Bluetooth, with slightly different names, there was also one 'removal'. To wit, Qualcomm Atheros BlueTooth Suite (64). I don't even know what that is, and I didn't do it. LOL

Thanks for replying, Bob

Quickset does a lot of things folk want such as control volume from keyboard, turn on/off devices and more.

I can't find the exact model to look at it deeper, that is I found 5 models of the 3647.

The Bluetooth may be part of the WiFi adapter. Maybe there's a BIOS to disable but you do bring up a great question. Is it time for the PC to not be so all over the map?
Bob

was go to the Dell web site to check on any updates. A new BIOS update was recommended and I downloaded and installed same.

Anyway, once I install the additional 4 gig's of memory that is due to arrive today, I will do the "reset your PC" thing. Then install everything that I want based on everything I have learned during this past month and be done with this project.

Hopefully things will work out as I want. I'm 68 and planning on keeping this computer for a very long time, with, hopefully, trouble free operation. What's that saying: In a perfect world... LOL

Thanks again, Bob