IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

OK, so I thought all of my Wireless Hell days were over with the installation of my Intel Wireless Adapter. Then I decided to see what it would be like to use my Verizon HTC XV6800 as a USB modem for my laptop. I give VZW a call, they offer to let me use the feature for free for a month, charging at $15 per month after that. How generous of them :) So I download the latest drivers for the phone to work as a modem, download the latest VZAccess Manager software and was able to follow the instructions on their website just fine for my model phone. Everything appeared to be working properly. I even got a display from the VZAccess Manager screen that showed me how strong of a signal I could get from the phone. I was pretty happy… then I clicked Connect.

Yeah, and Connect and connect and connect again. ARR! I kept getting errors that the computer could not establish a connection. So yesterday while I had some downtime at my Red Cross Golf Fundraiser, I call VZW tech support and they have me go through the hoops. It was a bit tricky since I called them on my
cell phone – I ended up having to borrow someone else’s so I could talk while troubleshooting the connection. We even tried making a manual connection to the VZW BroadbandAccess network. No go! so the very kind tech lets me know that I’ll receive a text message with the issue number in it and it will be looked at by the techs when it comes up in their queue.

About 30 minutes later I get a phone call from the same tech that helped me out indicating that someone else told her I needed to check the Microsoft site for “Error 720″ and will have to uninstall/reinstall the TCP/IP protocol. Well, I’m not daunted by this, but frankly I thought their brains were full of marshmallow. So I try to use the phone on my desktop first, just to see if I really needed to look at Dial-Up issues on my laptop. I’m all fired up now… tell ME to reinstall TCP/IP on my laptop will you? I will show you! As if I don’t know what I’m doing!? How dare you! I install everything on the desktop, click connect and… well it worked! What the hell? They were right? Actually, yeah… they were because I took the stock installatoin of Windows XP straight from the IBM image that came with Service Pack 1. I didn’t install it myself from scratch. *sigh*

I look on Microsoft’s site for the Error 720, but the only one I can find is one for Windows 2000 Professional. This particular KB article says to remove TCP/IP as part of the troubleshooting process. Well, you can’t do that in XP. I dig a little deeper and find a resolution on Lenovo’s (Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought the ThinkPad line from IBM) Support Forums. Here’s what I had to go through that worked for me.

So, thank you, VZ Tech! I really appreciate you calling me back on that because I was about to turn off the feature and rant on Verizon Wireless!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Adventures in IT. 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.