Hey Dell, been a long time since I posted here because I had no issues for over three years with my Inspiron 7720. Except Bluetooth. It kind of stopped working a year back and since I never used it anyway, i never looked into it much.
Except few days ago i purchased bluetooth headphones. And I realised my BT doesn't work in laptop. No icon in the taskbar, and although if go to charms bar and open "Change PC Settings", there is a "Bluetooth" entry under "PC and Devices" but all it shows is the devices i once used to use from two years ago. It shows that it's searching and dots running but no new device is searched. And my phone doesn't discover my PC bluetooth either.
So I went to Control Panel and searched for 'Bluetooth'. There was the "Change Bluetooth Settings" but clicking it does nothing. I could keep clicking it all day and nothing happened.
So I open device manager, and there it is... Bluetooth with a yellow mark. I uninstall it and check for hardware changes. The bluetooth is detected again and automatically installed, and few moments later the yellow mark appears on it again. I go its properties and it shows me "Code 10' - Couldn't start the device"
I think, okay maybe my bluetooth hardware is doomed so i purchased a new bluetooth USB dongle. I plug in the dongle and all its drivers are installed automatically. except, they too show this yellow mark and same error code. So i uninstall all bluetooth drivers and check for hardware changes. Both bluetooth drivers (the one in laptop and the one in USB) get installed again, but with same yellow mark on them. And no bluetooth setting ever opens from control panel. I even tried disabling the PC one and reinstalling the USB one but problem stayed the same.
I read somewhere that the reason USB bluetooth isn't working is because of my USB controller problem. The tutorial said to uninstall all USB controllers and install them again.
That's where it all went downhill. In device manager, I uninstalled everything under Universal Serial Bus Controllers. And after scanning for hardware changes, the drivers installed themselves back. Except the USB ports stopped working. All four of them. like they were just dead. I plugged in my mouse, keyboard, pendrive etc but nothing happened. not even a connecting sound.
So with all those USB things still plugged in, i uninstalled the USB controllers again and reinstalled them again using scan hardware changes option. And funny enough, there were three yellowed devices under USB controllers, probably representing the three things i had still plugged in three of the USB ports. But they were all labelled as "Unknown USB Device (Port reset failed)"
Then, i went to the Drivers folder where i keep all the downloaded drivers from Dell website and tried installing the USB 3.0 Extensible host controller. and I get this error soon as start installation:
Program Compatibility Assistant
This program has compatibility issues.
So apparently i can't even install the drivers i downloaded from Dell. I thought maybe they're old drivers so i downloaded new ones. And same issues with those too.
So i turned off the laptop and booted in BIOS. The USB keyboard worked fine there. Then i ran diagnostics. Everything was all good. No errors at all. Even mouse was working at that screen after diagnostics were finished.
But soon as i log onto Windows, USBs go dead. All four of them. The card reader works though.
Oh and Bluetooth! Funny thing happened. After my USBs were gone, i checked the 'bluetooth' section under device manger, and there was no more yellow icon on bluetooth driver. It showed it was working fine. but that was the only change. Nothing else changed. no device discovery, no opening of change bluetooth settings etc.
Now, unluckily, I had system restore disabled so cannot go back now. And I thought i'd reinstall windows from a USB but can't create a bootable USB since mine is the only laptop around here with Windows ISO saved. I don't have a Windows DVD around and i can't create a bootable USB drive because my USB ports don't work anymore.
This all started with a simple bluetooth issue and led to this.
Please help me. Tell me where the problem lies or is there any way i can refresh the windows to a state where no drivers are installed (like the state it comes in when its freshly installed)
PC specs:
Dell Inspiron 7720 3D Edition
3rd Gen Core i7 CPU (~3GHz)
2x4GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM
2GB GDDR5 nVidia GT 650M (3D, always on, no Intel Graphics, no nVidia Optimus)
Windows 8.1 Professional with all updates installed.
