Darkoshi

I'm sitting in the passenger side of the car, travelling homewards. The traffic conditions on I-95 in Virginia were a nightmare.

We have a DC-to-AC converter plugged into one of the cigarette lighters, so that we can charge both our cell-phones and our laptops while driving. Qiao has a little GPS unit which is plugged into his laptop via a USB cable, and we are using a map program on the laptop to navigate with. I have my cell-phone tethered to the laptop, for internet access. I've used it to look up vegan restaurants in the area, and am now using it to post to LJ. For a little while, I had both laptops out on my lap, in order to copy some files from one to the other with a flash drive. I'm using the Opera browser with turbo-boost enabled, as my cell-phone's internet is at dial-up speed. But it works!

On my desktop computer, I basically tried to follow the instructions on this page at www.booststuff.com.

However, it did not work exactly as described, because
1. I already had the USB drivers installed.
2. (more importantly) On my cellphone, I had the USB Reader mode enabled. So when I connected the phone to the computer, it was just acting like a USB drive instead of a modem.

Because of #2, the network connection I had created based on the instructions kept trying to use my regular dial-up modem instead of using the cellphone as the modem. So I temporarily disabled the dial-up modem, and manually added a new modem entry for "Motorola IDEN USB modem" under Control Panel - Phone and Modem Options. But when trying to connect with that modem entry, it still wasn't working. I kept getting the error "Error 692: There was a hardware failure in the modem (or other connecting device)".

To correct #2, on the phone I had to open the menu item Settings - Memory Card - USB Connection and change the selection from "Reader Enabled" to "Reader Disabled".

Once I had done this, then when I reconnected the phone to the computer, I got the popup "Found New Hardware (Motorola iDEN USB Modem)" and XP did whatever was necessary so that the phone could be used as a modem.

Note: With this tethering, the cellphone is not used as a dial-up modem, rather it provides the connection to the internet which is already available on the cellphone.

Then I still was getting the same error, because the modem entry I had set up manually was using COM2 (since I didn't know which port to select when I set it up). Once I changed it to COM3, the tethering worked fine.


On my laptop, getting the tethering to work was much easier. However, based on how I had done it on my desktop, I thought I had to set up the modem manually on the laptop too. That presented a problem, as the wizard didn't have any ports listed for selection. So I wasn't able to add the modem manually. The thing to keep in mind is that once you have the drivers installed, when you connect the phone to the computer (with the phone *not* in USB card reader mode), the modem entry gets added automatically - you shouldn't have to add the modem entry manually. The Motorola driver download page makes it sound like the driver installation will prompt you to connect the phone to the computer. But I didn't get any prompt. So once the drivers are installed, you just connect the phone to the computer and let the device be discovered.

As I mentioned before, the internet speed on Boost is relatively slow - as slow or slower than dial-up. So I'm not planning on using the tethering except on rare occasions. But I tried out Opera 10 with Turbo enabled on my laptop, and it worked well. It's still like dial-up used to be though, where you have to wait a while for the pages to load.

.

Now, with Q's cellphone, a Clutch i465, we had a different problem. We were trying to install Opera mini on it. That phone doesn't even have a USB card reader mode. But when we connected the phone to the computer, we didn't get the sound you get when you connect a USB device. Turns out that the plastic part of the plug on the Rocketfish universal USB to micro-USB cable we had bought was too big - it was preventing the micro USB plug from going all the way into the phone socket. So it looked like it was connected, but it wasn't really.

Q tried another cable which had the same problem, so now we've ordered one which is made specifically for the i465.

Remember how ever since I got my Boost cell-phone last year, the voice-mail indicator has not worked? Last January, after activating the phone, I spent a couple hours on the phone with customer support, and they were not able to get it fixed, and finally said I'd have to contact Motorola, as it must be a problem with the phone itself.

Well. Last week was the first time I accidentally did not add money to my account prior to the expiration date. I was a few days late - not late enough that I lost my number or anything, just that my phone services were temporarily disabled.

Yesterday, after turning on my cell-phone, I was surprised by a message indicating that I had 4 voicemails! And a little envelope icon displayed at the top of the screen!

So, having my account expire must have fixed or reset whatever the problem was.