A customer recently got a bigpond MF636 USB modem for her Compaq desktop PS (she can’t get ADSL).
She Installs the modem, and it works for about an hour, and then stops connecting to the internet.
I’ve not seen this model before, and find it works in an iteresting way:
– When you first plug it in, it acts like a USB drive, with the all the driver software automatically installing itself.
– After the driver software installs, it resets itself into USB modem mode (and the USB drive is no longer visible).
In this case, however, the software says that it can see the modem, it detects a signal strength of 4/5 bars, but pressing the connect button will have different effects, depending on which usb port you plug it into.
Mostly, it will appear to be connected, but no browsing, no ping, no email.
At first I thought: its trend thats interfering as usual.
But removing trend and resetting the windows firewall doesn’t fix anything.
I eventually start running out of ideas.
The only thing thats unusual about this PC is that it uses an AMD CPU, and that the USB modem (and the drivers) are probably less than 1 year old.
So its possible that the modem drivers have not been tested much on AMD hardware.
All I can suggest is that the customer returns the modem, and gets a different brand (a few days later, I’m told that the different modem worked correctly).