Intel Active Management Technology

[Billaboard]

I'm trying to get a handle on Bluetooth on Windows 10, and have sought out a machine with nothing that initially has control of any COM ports. I'm looking at bluetooth technology that uses the BT to COM drivers and need to be confident that I can blow away any of the "Ghost COM Ports" that Windows has always been plagued by. I think this means resetting a com port arbiter in the registry, although I've just found a program "GhostBuster" that looks as though it might simplify this.

On updating from W7 to W10, I seem to have gained SOL on COM4, which seems to have appeared because of Intel Active Management Technology.

Can I just uninstall this IAMT without it affecting anything? The machine is just used on a normal home network and stand-alone out in the field.

If anyone has tried the "GhostBuster" application, I'd be interested to know what they found. I have also been told that MS are hoping to improve later versions of W10 to deal with phantom serial ports.

[dr_st]

AMT is useless outside of a corporate centrally-managed setting. I would uninstall and turn it off as much as possible (it is not always possible to fully uninstall).

[Billaboard]

Thanks. I had to uninstall AMT and SOL separately, but the machine still works and I have got COM4 back.

As well as Ghostbuster, I've also now found this site
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/misc_tools_e.html
which has a couple of utilities relating to COM port cleanup.

I haven't yet worked out how the registry entry in com_name_arbiter relates to which COM port number is assigned to which connection, but maybe these utils will avoid having to know this.

[Hans Gruber]

There is usually an AMT setting in bios as well that i think you can turn off depending on which Thinkpad model you have.