How do I keep my bluetooth headphones from connecting to my windows 10 machine when it's connected to my phone?

Solution 1:

As far as I know, there is no way to dissuade Windows from connecting with a paired Bluetooth device. Some methods exist for that, which involve brute-force solutions :

• Connect the Bluetooth device after every log-in (including sleep, lock-screen, etc.) and then disconnect - Windows will not reconnect to a disconnected device.
• Pair-unpair the Bluetooth device for every use.
• Enable-disable the Bluetooth device for every use.
• Enable-disable the Bluetooth system service of Windows for every use.

For usability, one may create scripts for one or more of the above actions and use them in desktop icons, or use AutoHotKey to bind them to hotkeys.

Here are some useful commands for disable/enable of the Bluetooth Support system service:

net stop bthserv
net start bthserv

For the disable/enable of individual devices, you may use the DevCon command. You would need to know the identifying device id and the commands to use in elevated mode would look like :

devcon enable "USB\VID_0A12&PID_0001"
devcon disable "USB\VID_0A12&PID_0001"

Windows seems to be the only operating system that does aggressive auto-connection this way and doesn't have any setting for turning it off.