Indiscriminate Transgressions

Dell sells this card and it’s supposed to have GPS in it. Only, it doesn’t seem to. The help in the Dell Mobile Broadband Card Utility tells you how to use the GPS option in the tools menu, and/or the GPS Status button in the card manager. So here’s the card manager:

I don’t see me no GPS Status button. I contacted Dell tech support a few times over the last few months, and they eventually refer me to Sprint, which is ludicrous since Sprint a> sucks, b> doesn’t have customer support to speak of c> doesn’t support this card. I tried once.

So lo and behold on my final chat session with tech support tonight, the one where I’m planning on getting mad and demanding 40% of my purchase price refunded for false advertising, the man in India types these magic words: “The Dell Mobile Broadband Card Utility (DMBCU) determines the presence of GPS software when the software is installed.” Aha. Aha!! Registry.

So I fire up the process monitor. I run the DMBCU and capture events. I search for GPS and I find on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Novatel Wireless\NextGenCommon a key called GPSHWStatus:

…and it’s set to 0 or not there…

I’m running Vista x64 - this key would be different on 32 bit windows machines, should be the same but without the Wow6432Node\ part. So, on to registry editor:

Indeed, it is there and set to 0. So ah sets it to 1:

And the next time I run the DMBCU, it installs a driver(!) for … the GPS!

and would ya lookie here:

It seems to work. I’m inside and I haven’t checked it out yet, but when I hit that button it finds the GPS on COM6 and starts to search for satellites.

I did all this while the Dell tech support guy was connected to my machine remotely. He tried to pull down the Tools menu to look for the GPS entry, moused over all icons in my tray, and then told me I would have to contact Sprint. [sarcasm]I’m SO glad I allowed the remote connection.[/sarcasm] When I got angry about that, he spent 3 minutes looking up information and then mentioned the bit about the install. I did the rest and then near the end when I said “Did you see that? It installed a driver!” he says to me “Great. Glad we could fix your trouble.” Uh huh.

I hope this helps someone. I have seen many posts on the Dell Community forums about this with no solution.

I am here. On “poor farm road” in the way north of Vermont. But I have no less than _3_ working internet connections - my T-Mobile Dash is roaming on Cingular giving me EDGE, my Sprint EVDO card isn’t EVDOing but it is supplying a slow connection of some sort, and there’s a random “linksys” wifi signal here. Surprising. That is not my dog.

I thought I was going to write like crazy this last week, but I was mainly tired and groggy and felt like sleeping.

So my Dash is roaming on Cingular. My data is unlimited, and there are no extra fees to use it when roaming unless I’m out of the country, yet whenever I check my mail I get an alert telling me:

Alert

You are currently roaming. Synchronizing may result in additional charges.

I started to look into turning this off in the registry, but I keep getting distracted. Also when I receive an MMS, it alerts me that I have a pending message and then says:

Additional charges may apply while roaming.

New MMS pending

while giving you the option to Download, Postpone, or Reject. Wow, also very annoying. I’m going to pick up on that one tomorrow.