So far, I’ve been quite happy with my SmartBro Plug-It USB modem — in several areas in Davao City, I do get sustained download speeds of up to 60-70kbps. (Only certain areas have cellsites that are enabled with HSDPA.) At a charity concert where I volunteered as amateur videographer, I used SmartBro as my Internet connection for the video streaming, and the Webcast was fairly decent.
However, when I upgraded my system to Windows 7 (64-bit) a couple of days ago, I found that the drivers bundled with the device wouldn’t install properly. I have an Acer Aspire 2930, and the Plug-It model is a ZTE HSDPA USB Modem MF627.
Windows 7 is simply superb. It installed much faster compared to my experience with earlier versions of Windows, and I had no problems with drivers at all. Some drivers didn’t install automatically — for the AuthenTec biometric device and for the multi-card reader — but Windows 7′s improved Internet driver search took care of that.
And that’s what solved the problem for the ZTE modem as well. I searched the Web for solutions to the problem, because the SmartBro Plug-It wouldn’t work on Windows 7, but there were no real solutions. In one forum, someone advised that one should enable the ZTE drivers to run in Windows-2000 compatibility mode. But that won’t work for the Windows 7 Home Premium edition, because it doesn’t have compatibility mode. But that’s a rather dirty approach to the problem.
What finally made it work for me was Windows’ Device Manager. I went there, and saw the warning flags on the devices labeled ZTE. What you should do is right-click on each one and click on Install driver software (or something to that effect), and let Windows 7 do the rest! Once that’s done, you’ll see a new item under Modems: ZTE Proprietary USB Modem; and three new items under Memory technology driver (the Plug-It has a slot for a microSD card).
I’m using my SmartBro Plug-It right now to post this article!
