I had setup a customers laptop (Vista) with AntiVir (I kept the standard vista firewall and windows defender), and tested that her NextG wireless USB modem (BP3-USB) was working correctly and made sure the system had fully updated itself.

She then travelled out of town for about 3 months, and when she got back, she contacted me, saying that soon after I installed the antivirus, she could no longer connect to the internet.

After a bit more digging, she says that when the problem first happened, she called Bigpond (Telstra) and spent over 1 hour with technical support, until they said it isn’t their problem: it must be the antivirus that’s blocking access to the internet (I suspect they think AntiVir is a full security suite, with firewall, etc… so they point the finger at the antivir firewall… which doesn’t exist in the free version)

I can already smell something fishy.

I do a scan with malwarebytes, and it only detects some minor adware infection… nothing that would cause problems connecting to the internet.

Next, I try connecting using the USB modem. It connects correctly, but I can’t view web pages, and pings don’t work.

I look at the Antivirus, defender, and windows updates, and I see most have been updated between 1 and 2 months ago… looks like this has worked, in some fashion, since I last worked on it.

Since it seems to connect, then I start suspecting the firewall. I reset the Vista firewall back to its default settings.

Now, it seems to connect properly. I can view a few web pages, and then: nothing… no internet again.

Hmmm, looks like the firewall problem was masking another problem.

Maybe the BP3USB is damaged or overheating (the internet has many reports of the BP3USB being DOA, and all sorts of reliability problems with them).

So I download the latest drivers from bigpond: http://www.bigpond.com/res/images/helpcenterFAQs/wireless/bwbcmwin32_fullcd_2.13.zip

Hmmm, I notice the Vista laptop has bigpond software version 2.10.6 installed… Yet I’m downloading version 2.13.16

I setup the bp3usb on my own XP laptop, and it works perfectly for over 30 minutes. That means no overheating or other physical faults.

So, back to the customers Vista laptop: uninstall the V2.10.6 software, reboot, then install the V2.13.16 software that I downloaded (and re-enter the username/password)

And now the connection is perfect.

Now, the questions are:

• why couln’t BP tech support guide the customer into resetting the Vista firewall settings?
• why couldn’t BP tech support send the customer a CD with the latest software?

Customer says she will try billing telstra for my charges… I wonder how far that will fly?