Bluetooth Keyboard Blues

There are many fine cordless keyboards out there, and I do love the freedom and reduced clutter of using one. And, for my personal idiosyncrasies, I tend to go for Bluetooth keyboards as tracking all those dongles that otherwise come with the wireless keyboard is painful, and redundant, and wasted. If the dongle is lost, the keyboard is lost. And in my world, there are many systems that come and go, and even many keyboards, so remembering which keyboard goes with what system, or if a system is relocated, to decide if the dongle and keyboard go with it, or not. A lot of extra busy work that goes away if a universal bluetooth approach is in place.

So, Bluetooth keyboards are the way to go. Even if the system I want to use doesn't have built-in bluetooth, I can get one simple USB Bluetooth dongle and in an instant have all my bluetooth peripherals play with this system.

Fine until the keyboard starts to interfere with my work-flow.

What I had was a Logitech K810 BT Keyboard, one that can remember 3 systems to connect to. And it worked great, except in one system (it happens to be Windows laptop) where occasionally a character would be lost or missed. At the start of a paragraph, or after an interruption in my typing. And it varied unpredictably. But it was intensely annoying. Tried updating the bluetooth drivers. Tried getting the logitech system drivers for this keyboard. Tried rebooting. Re-discovering the keyboard. And numerous other diagnostics.

What finally corrected it was to turn off the power saving on the bluetooth radio in the OS.

Apparently, the radio will enter a low power state after a short period of no communication from the keyboard, and will miss the first transaction from the keyboard when leaving the low power state. The 'short period' is a number of seconds, so as long as you are typing consistently on the keyboard, it won't trip into this. But when you pause typing, for a thought, or a drink, or some other interruption, the bluetooth radio goes - aha, there's nothing, lets idle. Of course, if the pause is to move the bluetooth mouse then it's not actually a pause in bluetooth radio traffic, as now the mouse is active. Hence the hard time isolating this wrinkle.

I did report this issue to the folk at Logitech, but they were unable to resolve it as it is actually a Windows Driver issue, and I did post the resolution on their forums. And it's funny to read the comments, there, as it was one of those - I know how to turn off the Bluetooth radio power saving state, but I can't tell you how to do that without doing it. So I posted the breakthrough - turn off the bluetooth radio power save feature, without the step by step, screen-shot by screen-shot how-to guide, and people got frustrated they had to figure out what 'turn off the bluetooth radio power save feature' is.

I do hope, dear reader, that you can take on finding for yourself where to do this on your own steam.