Fixing Bluetooth Connection Issue on Boot Camp Windows

Recently I had to re-format my dad’s Macbook Pro 2017 13-inch model with Windows 10 and faced an issue I never faced before when installing via Boot Camp. Note that I did completely get rid of the macOS partition this time around, but did download the latest Boot Camp drivers prior to removing macOS completely.

The issue was that when connecting a Bluetooth mouse to the newly formatted Windows, the mouse would respond when I had the Bluetooth settings page open, but would become unresponsive when I closed it. When I opened the settings page again, it would show that the mouse was connected and start moving again. Weird.

After a few hours of digging around on numerous Apple support forums, reddit, and other various Korean blogs/cafes, I found suggestions of updating the Broadcom drivers.

To jump to the conclusion, this fixed it. If you face similar symptoms, read on to see if you have the same driver numbers, and try manually updating the Bluetooth drivers, despite what the auto update might suggest (it will say that you have the latest drivers).

  1. Go to your “Device Manager” and under “System devices”, you should see Broadcom Serial Bus Driver over UART Bus Eunmerator. Check its driver version. Mine said 12.0.1.873.
  2. If you try to auto-update to the latest, it will just say that you have the latest drivers.
  3. I downloaded a more recent version of the drivers from here. The version I downloaded at the time of this post is 12.0.1.875.
  4. After downloading and extracting the ZIP file, try to update your driver again except manually this time and specifying the folder you just extracted.
  5. It should install the latest version, and you should see the new driver version (in my case, 12.0.1.875).
  6. Completely shutdown your computer (not restart). Boot your computer again and your Bluetooth connection issues should be fixed.

Let me know if it doesn’t work as intended, or the drivers aren’t available anymore as I do have a backup of it.

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