No. 27254Anonymous 17th September 2019 Tuesday 9:58 pm27254Bluetooth keyboard/mouse dropping out
Alright lads. Here's the situation. I bought a fancy Microsoft Surface Ergonomic bluetooth keyboard, and every time I step away for more than ~5 minutes it does this thing where I have to press a key and then wait for 1-3 seconds. During this time the system is completely locked - whatever's on screen freezes in place and any sound or music stops.
This happens under Linux as well as Windows.
I've looked in power settings in Windows for dongle and mouse and switched it to never sleep wherever possible.
I've looked for others with the same problem, found a handful. Nobody had a solution.
As it happens, I've been given a Surface mouse for free. It also seems to suffer the same problem. My next step would be to buy another bluetooth dongle, but I'm broke and I'd rather not spend the money if can avoid it.
Is there an easy way of pinging bluetooth devices? Or any other way of keeping a bluetooth device awake? I don't mind charging batteries if it'll fix the problem.
>>27254 Microsoft online support tech here.
Bluetooth is gay. Don't use it. Use a fully heterosexual wired connection.
I never answer Bluetooth questions.
>>27255 There aren't many ergonomic keyboards on the market and I like everything about it other than this one issue, plus it cost me a lot of money. If there was a wired connection I'd use it.
>>27256 Seriously, I absolutely curve every bluetooth question in the queue because it's a shitty unreliable standard. Save yourself bother now and buy a wired keyboard and mouse. This is the best advice you will get.
>>27257 I've had a bunch of other bluetooth devices stretching back a decade and a half so I'm well aware of the benefits and shortcomings of the standard, and this is not a particularly strenuous use case.
So no, I get what you're saying, and do genuinely appreciate you taking the time to respond, but I'm not going to give up on an otherwise perfectly functional (and quite expensive) product.
>>27257 >Save yourself bother now and buy a wired keyboard and mouse.
Seconding both this advice and the sentiment. The only time I've ever had trouble with a wired connection was when I tried a stupidly long PS/2 cable, which was hilarious but entirely understandable.
I've probably missed the boat on this one, apologies for necroposting, will be sure to sage etc.
> During this time the system is completely locked - whatever's on screen freezes in place and any sound or music stops.
This sounds like an issue with the Bluetooth Stack or possibly a very badly behaved driver. (I'm assuming here that the lock-up only happens during the 1-3 seconds that the device is waking up, if so there's potentially some idiotic while loop blocking all other I/O, although given the number of different busses involved I still find that .... weird to say the least).
> Is there an easy way of pinging bluetooth devices? Or any other way of keeping a bluetooth device awake? I don't mind charging batteries if it'll fix the problem.
On linux you can use lp2ping. I'm not sure if there's a windows port, but you might get it to run under WSL if you're using Windows 10. You might also want to dig out the technical specification document for your keyboard and see if there's a vendor specific HCI command for setting its sleep timeout or what have you.
