Living with 7

I installed the Windows 7 beta to see if I liked it more than Vista. I did not have to live with the software so I put it on a junk drive on my laptop and used it only long enough to see that it had some skills.

At the same time I installed Jaunty Jackaloupe on another junk drive on the same laptop. Very nice but it was not a long term option because of the software I use. I did notice a big difference. Cellular modems turned out to be a surprise for me.

In my day job I have to setup and install Verizon PC5750 air cards on Windows 2000 and Windows Vista. There are bugs and tricks to the VZmanager software and you have to force it onto either OS. On Windows XP you can use the standard download software and you are fine.

I borrowed one of these aircards one weekend and decided to see if the new OS flavors were up to the challenge. Ubuntu identified the new hardware and I was online in a few seconds. The rest of this post will chronical the steps I took to get online with Windows 7. For the tech-weak knees turn away now.

I had decided that my 2gig, 2 year old laptop ran Windows 7 better than a new 4gb Dell Optiplex with Vista so I would try a longer term Windows 7 trial. Thanks to rare and brilliant move by Microsoft to allow for an unheard of Release Candidate trial period of Windows 7 I decided to commit.

I upgraded my Dell Latitude D620 to 4gig of Ram and a 7200/8mb cache/260gb hard drive and installed Windows 7 RC. I won't deny that there are a few odd "vista" like issues with 7 but overall I like it. That is now that I fixed the major problem. Verizon Air Card!

I downloaded the VZAccessManager from the Verizon website. I ran the setup and it asked for me to insert the card into the PC. I popped it in and nothing. Windows 7 had a message that it did not have the drivers for my new hardware that it called Pantech PC card. The install failed telling me that the OS was not supported. I figured that the VZ software worked but that the card install failed.

The normal course of action would be to go into Device Manager and update the drive to the drivers manually. I found that the Pantech folder was not in Program Files. I drilled down to \Program Files\vzmanager\drivers\pc5750\install\ and only found setup.exe. I ran this but it did not do much of anything but tell me that the OS was not supported. I heard this somewhere before.

I googled and googled but did not find much info. I guess that is why I am writing this.

I took the setup.exe out of the install folder and ran it on my Windows XP desktop. This created a nice directory filled with drivers! Yeah. I copied the files to my laptop. I used device manager and updated the drivers individually. This solved one problem. Windows 7 could now see the modem right but VZaccess manager still would not use it.

Using a tip from a posting online I uninstalled VZaccess manager and killed the modem in the network connections folder and rebooted.

This worked!! I was able to create a custom dial up connection and make a connection.

To recap the Verizon Air Card install on Windows 7:

Download the VZAccessMgr software from Verizon's website
Install the software on a Windows XP machine.
Copy the PANTECH PC Card folder from the XP machine to the Windows 7 machine from the Program Files directory on the XP box.
Insert the PC card into the Windows 7 PC.
It will fail to install the drivers.
Go into the device manager and update the drivers for each of the ! error devices with the drivers in the PANTECH PC Card folder.
Reboot.
Go into the network sharing center and setup a new connection and select Dial Up Networking.
All I put in was the #777 as the phone number, no password and no username.
This worked!!!

Milage may vary. I am pretty lazy about this sort of thing but I appreciate those people that aren't lazy about documentation. I hope this helps those in this situation.