TechBlog from Sewell

Here a Sewell Direct we get a good number of calls about our USB to PCMCIA cellular modem adapters. This setup help will attempt to cover the basic steps you can take to get your card to work.

Make sure your card is supported. Jordan wrote an excellent blog to help with this at Jordan’s compatibility chart.

Once you’ve verified your card is supported the next step is to make sure your drivers are installed correctly.

1) Plug in your adapter without the phone card inserted.

2) Go to the device manager. This can be accomplished through the control panel, but my favorite way is to right-click “My Computer”, go to properties. On Vista there is a button on your left, on XP go to the hardware tab and there is a button there.

3) Once inside the device manager, check for a category called “USB PC card readers”. For the U132 it looks like this-

Notice that there are two devices under this category. It is the same for the U142, but on the U111 there is not a diagnostics port. When I installed this the first time my computer only found one device, so I unplugged the adapter and plugged it back in so that I could install the second driver.
If there are no error messages on the devices in the “USB PC card readers”, congratulations! You’ve finished installing the adapter.
If there ARE error messages, or a device isn’t showing up, try disconnecting then reconnecting the adapter to the computer to see if the found new hardware window opens up again. If you can’t get the found new hardware wizard that way, in the device manager you can right click the device and select “update driver” to get the wizard up. Show the wizard where to find the driver on the cd. It should install correctly once you manually show it the driver.

4) While in the device manager, check to make sure your card is installed. Plug your card into your adapter. The device manager should refresh, and (assuming you’ve installed the drivers for your card on this computer) your cellular modem should show up if you expand the “modems” drop-down menu. Once again, make sure there are not any error messages.

5) Now that you know the adapter and modem are functioning properly, it is time to try to establish a connection. My suggestion is to try your provider’s software first, but if that doesn’t work (some software is unable to recognize the card through the adapter) you may need to set up a manual connection. The process requires a blog of its own, and if you get lost feel free to call our tech support. As a general guide use this link on the manual setup for the Verizon 5740 in combination with the setup information for different providers to set up the manual connection. If your provider is not listed in the second link, you will need to call your provider in order to get their manual dialing information.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 12:30 pm and is filed under PCMCIA, USB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.