laur.ie's blog

If you have a Dell E4300, as wonderful as they are, you may have trouble sourcing a 64bit driver for Windows 7. It’s not listed on the drivers page on the Dell site (as of writing), nor is there even a 64bit Vista driver.

So, to google! (which is probably why you’re here after all) and there are a few suggestions of installing the 32bit driver and Dell Connection Manager. I was fully expecting to have some 3rd party software to at least connect to the network, but I wasn’t sure about the 32bit driver, so I continued on my Googling. And it bought me to a page hidden deep in the URL structure of the Dell support website. This link here! A 64bit 5530 HSPA Mobile Broadband driver for Windows 7.

It’s just listed a driver, so I thought it was a good starting point, so let’s install it. What happened next was pleasantly surprised. Firstly, it found a GPS port. Does this card also contain a GPS receiver? I haven’t managed to make it work yet, but that would be super cool… The best surprised was what happened when I clicked on the Windows 7 “Connect to” system tray icon.

Windows 7 Connect To Dialog

What’s this?! I didn’t even have to tell it I’m on T-mobile, it just popped up and showed me the signal, and let me connect. No config, worked first time. From installing the driver to connected to WWAN in under 30 seconds.

Perhaps I’m easily surprised, but I think this is one of my favourite features of Windows 7 so far; it’s so nice that it’s consistent, as well as the improved UI for the “connect to” menu in general. It makes the utility for managing mobile broadband I used in Vista look like a childs toy…

That was easy

This has been driving me insane for a while. I thought it was MCE. I swore at MCE every time my computer buzzed into life in my room. It’s not very quiet, and it can do it so stealthily… It’ll turn itself back off so most mornings I won’t even realise it’s done it.

I only caught on because sometimes I catch it in its dirty act, and last night it actually managed to cause a BSOD so wehn I came to turn it on it had actually shut itself down, sigh.

I decided to investigate again and found this handy tip hidden away on a blog type thing:

It’s Windows Update. That sneaky little bugger. Especially useless since the wakeup event in the event viewer is handily marked as being caused by… “Unknown”. To stop this:

It is possible to disable this behavior in the group policy editor (run gpedit.msc). It’s under: Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Update and the setting is called: “Enabling Windows Update Power Management to automatically wake up the system to install scheduled updates.”

I will let you know if this doesn’t fix my problem but I’m looking forward to not being woken up tonight…

EDIT: Yeah, it didn’t work. I actually caught it one night, turned the screen on just in time to see “Configuring Updates…” and then “Shutting down” at which point it turned off my machine! Funny considering the day before I’d turned off updates completly AND stopped and disabled the Windows Update service.

Last night i decided to install some updates, to see if that fixed it; after 2 hours of waiting, some installed, most failed, and it still woke up at 5am despite me turning updates back off again.

Anyone have any clues?!

EDIT 2: I’ve found a workaround, see this post: http://laurie.denness.net/blog/?p=59