[RESOLVED] USB Modem problem

[dunedin]

Hello peoples

My daughter (from Scotland) is in Brisbane on a working holiday. She needs an internet connection for many things and I`m just about tearing my hair out trying to get her connected.

Does anyone have any idea why her Dell XP laptop will not connect to the internet in Australia? Is there anything which needs set up differently to connect there? I checked the machine thoroughly before she left and it was all working fine. It would connect instantly both wired or wireless.

At first she was connecting fine to a chatroom, but the connection always dropped after a short while. I went through all the troubleshooting over the phone with her but we could not fix it.

Yesterday she bought a Telstra USB modem and cannot get it to work either. Customer Services do not understand why it will not work, they say it should work. The shop was very helpful but nothing they did worked. Firewall was off and connection showed 4 bars which is a good signal.

The modem installed and worked fine on a laptop belonging to the shop, so the problem is with her laptop. Can it be some setting due to the fact that the laptop is from the UK?

She has had to return it as she had only one day to get her money back, so no longer has it to try any fixes.It would have been better if she could have kept it longer so we could try to troubleshoot the problem.

Anyway, we do not have it to play with and I was hoping someone might know something definite which would justify buying it again. We have her all set up with Skype but can`t use it.

Unfortunately I have no more information about the modem

Thanks everyone

Elaine

[Steve R Jones]

There shouldn't be any sort of issue about the different countries.

Thing that comes to mind is many of these modems usually also have an eithernet connection and that it works Much better.

[dunedin]

Thanks Steve

I`m afraid there is no such option, just USB for these new modems. They are for laptop internet access anywhere

http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/...ardcontent.jsp

Elaine

[Steve R Jones]

Oooops. My Bad....Shows ya how much time I spend with notebooks...

Maybe we can call it even. I cracked the glass on my CRT monitor trying to get the bug off of it

[dunedin]

Oh, that`s funny

I thought it might cause a bit of wiping of screens, but no cracking

Elaine

[SuperSparks]

I have no experience of USB modems, but I'm pretty sure that the default gateway, DNS servers, etc. will still need to be correctly set in Windows. Can you get your daughter to paste the Ipconfig /all results please?

[dunedin]

Thanks Nick, I wish she could do that, but she does not have the modem now.
She only had one day to return it if it did not work. Having spent so much time with the Telstra Tech Support to no avail, she returned it. At $299 it was too much money to lose.

It has to be a setting on the machine specific to the USB modem as she can connect to the networks in OZ by wireless and also by ethernet cable. Unfortunately she is not now able to use these options.

I don`t think many people have much experience with these modems yet, that`s the problem. I am so frustrated that I can`t get my hands on the machine + modem myself to play with it.

Elaine

[Train]

Roll back to before she tried using the USB modem.

Those usb modems can really mess up the regs and there are a couple regs you have to remove, then remove networking reboot and reinstall the network.

I have been talked through it several times. A real PAIN. Why I say do not use USB modems.

[dunedin]

Thanks Train, we`ve done a System Restore as well....no better.

We would not be trying the USB modem if we had any other options.
My daughter is moving around all the time just now, taking jobs in various places and exploring.

In the New Year she will be taking part in a study of the plight of corals with the University of Queensland and will be in the one place for longer. Maybe she will be able to get a proper connection then.

But in the meantime she just has no way to connect, and the USB modem would have been the answer if it had only worked

Elaine

[Train]

Rats, I had hoped it would work.

SFC /scannow ?
Doubt if it would fix anything but . . . . may be worth the try.

Like your birds. Slap happy. LOL

Maybe should have gone with a card instead of usb.

[dunedin]

I don`t really think it is an sfc "thing" either

Yes a card would have been better but the modem was all they had to offer her

Elaine

[dunedin]

Well, I`m here to tell you that the problem is solved.

I always thought it was something simple that we were missing, but it turned out to be so simple that I am embarrassed to tell you.
Having said that, simple though it was, it is something I have never seen before.

I sent my daughter off to get help from a computer tech advertising in the newspaper, having told her “Don`t let him do this, that and the next thing”.

He immediately told her it would be the firewall.
The first thing I did with her was to turn off the firewall, as that usually lets you connect if the firewall is blocking the connection. But he said that when you turn off a firewall and then re-enable it, it loses all its settings. He opened Zone Alarm and everything had a red cross, everything was blocked.
Once he had fixed this her machine connected on his networks so she went and bought the USB modem again and connected first time. We are on Skype now.

All the times I have disabled then re-enabled a firewall I have never known it to lose the settings like that so I never thought to check. Probably would have checked if I had had the machine to play with, but that problem never occurred to me. Have you seen this before??

Anyway, thanks for helping. This is something new for me to bear in mind in the future.


Elaine

[Steve R Jones]

Interesting to know....