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by bigallen 889 days ago
Wait, are you saying you just trade the wireless functionality from the built in Bluetooth to an external Bluetooth dongle?
3 comments

The dongle is definitely not using Bluetooth. Wireless peripherals with USB dongles generally have their own custom radio protocol, for better or worse.
Before later revisions of Bluetooth with ultra-low-power modes, a mouse using Bluetooth was considerably more power-hungry than dedicated radio interfaces -- short battery life.
I had one of those, a Logitech MX1000.

It needed to charge multiple times per week in a cradle and always indicated the battery life when it was moved around.

It would die in the middle of playing DotA, so I had two and would pause the game with the admin commands on my host bot for just long enough to pull the waiting one out of the dock and press the pairing buttons. Fun times lol.

Usually it's for better
A physical OEM USB dongle on PC side, whether Bluetooth or not, and an On/Off switch on the peripheral side would have certainly prevented the issue in discussion.
Surely if you disable bluetooth in the OS it'll disable any bluetooth dongles as well?
Usually from computer’s point of view these devices look like regular USB mice or keyboards so disabling Bluetooth will not disable them.
Proprietary wireless dongles for keyboards and mice are often not Bluetooth.