No Bluetooth Adapters Found

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

At this point, it's becoming a trend that once or twice a year, something goes wrong with my PC. At one point, reseating the power cables fixed a random BSOD issue. Then after that, reseating the CPU fixed a POST issue. And in a similar theme but not the PC itself, cleaning the PCB of the mouse fixed it. So far, I've been able to keep up with the random issues. This time around...

It's Bluetooth.

My machine suddenly stopped detecting the Bluetooth adapter. And this one's an odd one because these days, Bluetooth and WiFi live on the same chip. On most desktop motherboards with built-in Bluetooth and WiFi, it's a small M.2 card under an EMI shield near the audio and ethernet sockets. One would expect that, if the adapter card is failing, both Bluetooth and WiFi would go. But no, I still have WiFi, which led me into thinking that it was a driver issue when in reality it was a hardware issue. And the fix?

Reseating the adapter card.

It was a shot in the dark, a last-ditch effort before giving up using Bluetooth on my PC altogether. And surprisingly it worked. In fact, I've done it twice already. I'm beginning to think something in the immediate environment is causing all these reseating fixes. Likely humidity causing corrosion of the contacts. It could also be thermal stresses causing the parts to wiggle out of place.