Poor out of box experience. Asus Zenbook Duo 2026 UX8407 Keyboard disconnects from Bluetooth after docking and undocking

Question

Just got a new Asus Zenbook Duo 2026. 2 days old. Everything works except for a key feature. Everytime I dock then undock the keyboard, it drops the Bluetooth connection. I'll have to unpair then re-pair the keyboard to Bluetooth for it to work undocked from the laptop. Tried Asus chat tech support a bunch of times and they just gave me the general run around of are your drivers updated or is your physical button switched on etc etc. One tech said it's a Bluetooth handshake issue but provided no further solutions. I've turned off the Bluetooth power management in Device Manage and I've even factory re-set windows. Problem still persists.

I've had a Zenbook Duo 2024 and that was never the issue. This is a less than satisfactory out of box experience.

Any one got any ideas?

Answer 1

That is incredibly frustrating, @D Li , especially on a brand-new 2026 Zenbook Duo. Since you've already ruled out power settings and went as far as a full Windows reset, this isn't a standard Windows Bluetooth bug. The Zenbook Duo relies on physical pogo pins to communicate while docked, and it is supposed to seamlessly hand off to Bluetooth the exact millisecond you pull it apart. The tech who mentioned a "handshake issue" was spot on—Asus runs a proprietary background service to manage this automatic hardware state switching. When you un-dock, the service is hitting a snag, causing Windows to think the keyboard is still physically attached and preventing the Bluetooth radio from waking up.

To force that hardware handoff to behave, press Windows Key + R, type services.msc, and hit Enter. Find ASUS Optimization Service, right-click it, change the Startup type to Automatic, and click Restart to fully refresh the hardware monitoring loop. If that doesn't fix it, right-click your Start button, open Device Manager, click View at the top to select Show hidden devices, and expand the Keyboards section. Right-click and uninstall any transparent, grayed-out ghost keyboard entries—this forces Windows to completely rebuild its hardware state tracking from scratch the next time you un-dock!