Dongle wont connect on laptop

[pilpot]

Hi

My brother has a pay as you go dongle, worked fine up until about 2 weeks ago, when it kept saying no signal, he tried in various rooms, at friends homes etc no joy. He went to the local Vodaphone shop who told him his laptop had lots viruses that was why wouldnt work and to run maywarebytes, I did this for him but no viruses found just errors these have been cleared out but dongle will instal but wont load still says no signal and if you switch laptop off and on again you have to re-install the dongle but still says no signal but we found it will work on his tower computer anyone got any suggestions what problem might be

thanks

[Retired-Dave]

Hi pilpot,

We know it's not the dongle itself as it works in the tower.

Is the tower in the same place as the laptop? If it is, then it's not a local signal issue.

We have a troubleshooting thread which covers many problems people find when using their dongles, so I'd take a look to see if anything there matches what he's seeing.

If none of this helps, can you confirm the following:

 - What model dongle is he using?

 - What operating system is he using on the laptop and the tower? Is it the same one?

 - Is the anti-virus checker you used up to date?

 - Can you describe what happens when he tries to use it? Is there an error message, for example?

Dave

[headcheese]

Hello,

As Dave mentions this doesn't soudn lieka dongle problem, otherwise you'd get the same on the tower.

Does the "own number" show at the bottom of the Vodafone Mobile Broadband (VMB) window? The reason I ask is that the VMB gets the signal strength by sendign AT commands to the dongle. It also uses AT commands to get the "own numnber".

Also, you can tell if the dongle itself is picking up a singal from the colour of light on the dongle. Althoguh this varies a bit from model to model, the general rule of thumb is flashing blue means the dongle can see a 3G signal and a flashign green light means that the dongle can see a 2G signal.

It's possible that another applciation is polling the port the dongle is using. You'd normally expect thsi to stop the dongle being detected by the VMB software (saying no device detected), but it might be worth looking into things along these lines. You can tell if another applciation (even one runnign in the background) is polling the port by doing a clean boot or selective start up, as this stops backgroudn applications loading on startt up. Clean boot instructions can be found here.

I hope that helps.