Windows 7 and a mobile broadband nightmare

Rating: One of our dongles is missing!

Using a mobile broadband dongle while travelling has become such an everyday occurrence that when it stops functioning, disaster strikes. This is what happened to GoMo News when a Samsung Netbook NC-10 was upgraded to Windows 7.

The favoured mobile dongle is a Huawei E220 device supplied by 3 UK. It suddenly stopped working after the software drivers on the NC-10 had been upgraded to reflect the installation of Windows 7 (from Windows XP).

The struggle to restore the E220 as a working item was extremely messy, but success has been achieved at last.

The obvious first step when the dongle stopped working was to upgrade its internal software. Surfing 3 UK’s support site didn’t turn up anything promising. This link doesn’t seem to work.

Hence, GoMo News tried Huawei’s own technical form where mistake No:1 was made. The very latest version of Huawei’s ‘Mobile Connect’ software was installed. That didn’t fix the problem.

The cure was to jump back one version and go to release – 107.05.00.03. This now works. Along the way, GoMo News made some other interesting discoveries.

For starters, owners of Apple Macintosh laptops will probably be having the same problems with their mobile dongles. There’s new software on the 3 UK site to overcome potential problems for Macs – 3ConnectUK_2008_1006_r66.

Curiously this fix  mentions it works with everything but the Huawei E220. But back to Windows 7 itself. On the Huawei site there’s a file variously described here as a ‘hot fix’ or Huawei-tool for overcoming Windows 7 problems.

This progam can be found here. GoMo News ran this patch but can’t vouch for whether or not it fixed anything.

The reason? Well, the chief problem turned out to be the small USB connecting cable between the computer and the dongle itself. Over time it has obviously been damaged. Replacing it help fix our problems.

Another interesting gem that came out of this bug-fixing exercise is that owners of the ZTE MF627 mobile broadband dongle do look like they need to install new software from 3 UK if they’ve migrated to Windows 7.

It was a long and arduous journey but at least our E220 now seems happy to work under Windows 7.