Verizon 620 Install problem Fixed on Gateway notebook

TxEVDOguy · EVDO Newbie Joined: 10 Aug 2006 Posts: 2

I wanted to share with the community my install issues with my V620 Aircard for the benifit of others. I had a Dell, install went just fine. I used my aircard on my dell for many months. I knew the card was good.

I just recently bought a Gateway CX2724 from Best Buy, which is the same as the CX210 on the Gateway website. The drivers, freshly downloaded from the verizon website, were the latest drivers avaliable. They would install no problem.

When the part of the Setup came to insert the PC Card, the VZAccess Manager would just sit waiting for the card to be installed. Windows XP would recognize a PCMCIA device and start installing drivers. The problem was that the proper drivers would not get installed. Verizon help was no help. The device manager was stuck with a yellow exclamation mark under USB devices on 2 NEC PCI to USB host adapter. The error code was Error10.

No matter how often I uninstalled the drivers, reinstalled, tried different versions, etc... the device manager would always report NEC to PCI USB bridge could not start.

I went so far as to order a Kyocera aircard at full price to try another brand of card in my laptop. $280!!! It hasn't arrived yet but gladly I will be refusing delivery!

Gateway's website does not offer easy to find downloads for their devices. But upon sniffing around I found a CX bios update for the 210 series laptop that was not posted as avaliable for the CX2724. My laptop had version 78.03 BIOS and the update on Gateway's website for the 210 was 78.04.

I downloaded it, installed the bios just fine and rebooted. Crossing my fingers, I re-ran the install, inserted the PC Card when prompted and POOF, it detected properly after a few minutes and went to the next step!

I don't know what the BIOS changed, but the aircard works as expected now. I was thinking that the problem might be related to the Tablet PC extras on my notebook. I'm glad to find out it was a BIOS issue afterall.

If you're having trouble installing V620 drivers for the Merlin card, or if your v620 is not detected, or if you get error code 10 in the device manager on the NEC to USB host bridge, I think the problem is more hardware related like mine than OS related.

Good luck. I hope this helps out anyone else with a factory fresh Gateway Tablet PC.

TxEVDOguy · EVDO Newbie Joined: 10 Aug 2006 Posts: 2

Well, I had to post an update. As it turns out the BIOS update wasn't the cure all that it seemed to be. The 620 would be detected better, but when trying to actually dial # 777, the modem would not connect properly. I tried for hours to resolve this. In all actuality, what I discovered was that the BIOS update fixed The NEC to PCI detection problem only about 4 out of 5 times. Sometimes it still installed with the yellow exclamation marks. So obviously the bios update wasn't the fix I thought it would be.

But the good news is that the Kyocera model works great. Install and detection had no problems.

Good Luck!