Thinkpads Forum

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.

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).

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.

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