Anya Shanahan's Shack

Don’t go to the release for Battlefield:Bad Company. The only thing you end up with is a hangover. Courtesy of the cinnamon flavored spirit of evil.

You only get to download the game for up to 6 months after you buy it. This is completely lame as it means that you have to back it up somewhere just in case you lose it. For an additional $6 you get to download it for an entire 2 years. <sarcasm&gt>How brilliant is that!&lt/sarcasm&gt>. Compared to a service like Steam where you can download it an arbitrary number of times to any pc that is connected to the steam service. Anywhere in the world. At any time. Until they go broke (but that will be telegraphed well in advance I hope).
Six months. Silly billies!

 4076 twhirl       4.2%  0:27.47   9   182    568   40M  7664K    52M   402M

This is while it’s hidden. I presume it’s not actually twhirl, but is instead is the Adobe Air platform.
When I start top and I’m not doing anything I expect to see something akin to:

 4102 top          6.5%  0:01.00   1    18     29 1124K   188K  1716K    18M

at the head of the list. Not something that’s supposed to be running in the background doing nothing

Jeez, these little blighters either work correctly straight out of the box or they want to break your soul.
Step 1: Install the software that tries to be installed when you plug in the device. If you’re lucky once the software is installed you may be just able to work. If not then proceed to step 2
Step 2: Check that the device has been assigned correctly. Open up the device manager. From the start menu in vista in the search box you can type ‘devmgmt.msc’ (no quotes). This should give you one option, on the search list that you can click on. Accept the windows UAC prompt and you should now be faced with the scary device manager.
From the view menu choose View->Devices by Connection. Tunnel Down the line of + signs that probably start at ‘ACPI x86-based PC’->’Microsoft ACPI Compliant System’->’PCI Bus’ looking for a ‘USB Host Controller’. It may be called something like ‘Intel(R) …. USB Universal Host Controller’, or something like that. The one you’re interested in has a ‘USB Root Hub’ below it that has a ‘Mass Storage Device’ which, when expanded shows the pretend CDrom that you installed the software from.
Right click on the Mass Storage Device that’s immediately below the ‘USB root hub’ and choose ‘Update Driver Software…’. Pick ‘Browse my computer for driver software’. Pick ‘Let me pick rom a list of device drivers on my computer’.
Uncheck the ‘Show compatible hardware. In the manufacturer box pick the (Standard USB Host Controller) manufacturer. In the model list pick ‘USB Composite Device’. Click Next. Expect a complaint from windows saying that it’s probably incompatible so click the ‘yes’ button there.
Once that’s complete unplug the data modem thingy wait a few seconds and then plug it back in. It will take a few seconds (up to 30, be a bit patient). If the datamodem software starts up without an issue at this point then you may be able to simply use it. If not then there’s the painful stage 3
Stage 3: You probably have some program that is interrogating the cdrom drive of the modem. The quick fix is to de-assign the drive. From the start menu type ‘diskmgmt.msc’. Accept the UAC prompt.
There should be a list of Disk 0 (and possibly more Disk entries) at the bottom, below a smaller table of ‘Volume, Layout, Type, File System ….’. There should be one CD-ROM entry matching the physical cd/dvd drive in your computer and another matching the pretend one from the modem software. Right click on the CD-ROM entry for that and pick ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths…’. Click Remove and choose the Yes option from the complaining dialog.
The disadvantage here is that when you plug in the USB modem from now on the datamodem support application will not automatically start up. The advantage is that you don’t need to uninstall nero or whatever application is causing the problem. I keep the convenience of nero for the cost of starting the program by hand.
If by this stage the datamodem application does not show you the modem, I would recommend boxing it back up and bringing it back to where you bought it as they need to be thwacked over the head with this POS.
This entry is prompted by having to guide someone over the telephone on how to do this themselves. It is not fun.

Software is hard. I kinda get that. Something to having worked in the business for a few years. When a bug is filed in software I wrote if feels like a little arrow in my chest. Now start selling it mainstream. Every issue you’ve not addressed in the current version is poked at you 10,000 times.
That’s why you file issues to a generic mail address in large corporations. The only problem is that because you don’t know “the language” to use when filing, it will probably be lost. Filling in series of forms might make this easier for the company, but not for the consumer.
Oh well, looks like we’re screwed?