Turning off Bluetooth without SmartWi installed

I did a clean install of Vista a few weeks back and I decided not to install the SmartWi application. Is there a way to turn off the Bluetooth in order to get longer battery life? I have just been disabling the Bluetooth in the device manager.

I also disabled the 'Bluetooth Software' from the startup items, but the bluetooth icon still appears after a restart. Does this signify that it is on?

 

If it's turned off in device manager it's off.

see this thread about the mini devcon utility some guys made to quickly toggle hardware on/off to save power. there are x86 and x64 versions so make sure you go through the entire thread. The last posts have the latest versions.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=330378

 

i found that disabling bluetooth didnt do anything to conserve my battery power. i still get roughly 3hrs out of my bpl2c battery.

1) ive tried doing it w/ the smartwi app(where thats another startup program along w/ the bluetooth manager and only when windows loads..it then disables bluetooth and the led on my vaio SZ)

2) ive tried the wireless switch setting utility(where again its another startup program and it tends to take your wireless lan connection offline for 5 secs when bluetooth loads w/ windows so it wasnt worth it for me.

3) i tried the devcon also but didnt have much luck. i probably couldve tried harder though.

anyway, i didnt see a big difference in battery length so i just leave bluetooth on. i had even tried turn off some of the devices like the ethernet jacks but didnt see a difference. good luck and let me know if you find any other solution!