How do I keep my bluetooth headphones from connecting to my windows 10 machine when it's connected to my phone?

My laptop (running Win10) repeatedly "steals" the bluetooth connection for my headphones while they're connected to my phone. The only way I've been able to prevent the headphones' connection from switching to the laptop is to play some media or make a phone call immediately after reconnecting to my phone, or to unpair the headphones from the laptop.

The headphones are Plantronics Backbeat Go 2, and the specifications from the Plantronics product page give the following information for the Bluetooth entry:

Bluetooth v2.1: A2DP 1.2, AVRCP, HFP v1.5, HSP v1.1

Thanks in advance!

Answer

As far as I know, there is no way to dissuade Windows from connecting with a paired Bluetooth device. Some methods exist for that, which involve brute-force solutions :

• Connect the Bluetooth device after every log-in (including sleep, lock-screen, etc.) and then disconnect - Windows will not reconnect to a disconnected device.


• Pair-unpair the Bluetooth device for every use.


• Enable-disable the Bluetooth device for every use.


• Enable-disable the Bluetooth system service of Windows for every use.

For usability, one may create scripts for one or more of the above actions and use them in desktop icons, or use AutoHotKey to bind them to hotkeys.

Here are some useful commands for disable/enable of the Bluetooth Support system service:

net stop bthserv
net start bthserv

For the disable/enable of individual devices, you may use the DevCon command. You would need to know the identifying device id and the commands to use in elevated mode would look like :

devcon enable "USB\VID_0A12&PID_0001"
devcon disable "USB\VID_0A12&PID_0001"

Windows seems to be the only operating system that does aggressive auto-connection this way and doesn't have any setting for turning it off.