Wednesday 2 March 2011

ASUS 3G EeePC - 1000HG - PING but browser fails

Well I haven't blogged for a while, but for the sake of any other EeePC fanatics who are suffering the same frustration I have with my little netbook, here's a tip.
We have two of the ASUS EeePC 1000HG netbooks in the family  (as well as a couple of the other models too) and we really love them.
At 9~10inches and very light, they are a GREAT for the kids to lug to college and my wife and I to use on the train to/from work each day.
We run all manner of software on them from games to Office apps, including Visio; Powerpoint; Access; etc. Sibelius music composition software, iTunes, etc etc etc. 

With prior models, there was no inbuilt 3G capability so you had to continually carry and attach/detach the annoying external USB modem (an Huawei E220). They are a great little modem and worked well, it was just annoying having the thing hanging off the side of the netbook all the time and having to put it away every time you wanted to stow the netbook..
With the EeePC 1000HG came the on-board 3G modem, which in our case was the Huawei E770.
When I first set it up using a data-only SIM from the 3-Network here in Australia, it worked fantastically well, apart from the lousy coverage and below-average service which the carrier offered! (Thats what you get for $15/mth)

While I was away on a business trip I took works E220 USB modem which uses the OPTUS network carrier, so I didn't have to consume my bandwidth while I was connected to work. That was when my woes began.
I plugged the OPTUS USB modem into the netbook and as expected it came up and ask if I wanted to install the drivers for it. Naturally, I did ... the install which I had used several times without error on other laptops ... failed!
To cut the story short, it turned out the Huawei E220 install somehow conflicted with the internally installed Huawei E770 and then neither worked! Being away from home, I did not have the original driver disk which came with the Eee to reinstall the internal modem (nor did I have a portable DVD drive even if I had,had the disk) and I could NOT get the external one to play AT ALL!  I wound up downloading over a rather slow conference WiFi connection, what I thought was the correct driver from ASUS, after searching on this ASUSTEK support page for my model (1000HG) , supplying my OS (WinXP) and downloading the offered 3G Wireless Driver.  (as CMO_3G_Driver.zip)

Hindsight is a wonderful thing!  I should have paid more attention, as it wasn't the driver for the Huawei modem!  Again, a long story short ... that failed dismally! After some extended searches of forums I came up with the fact that the driver for the EeePC 1005PE was compatible with the 1000HG Huawei and comes in the form of 3G-HEM770-V2_0_3_824.zip, one source of which is http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/EeePC/Driver/   
Its about an 86MB zip so quite large over a slow WiFi link!
 At-least I was operational again!
....BUT!  .... All was NOT well! 
Gradually as time went by the 3-network coverage became more and more unreliable as they merged with Vodaphone and demand on their resources increased. Somewhere in amongst trying to get their service to work reliably, one of the many useless support suggestions tipped my EeePC 3G Connection Manager over the edge.  I could connect fine, I could use POP3 email (Outlook) and I could PING everything from the command prompt, but try and use any browser for HTTP and it gradually went from sporadic to unusable.
I tried everything I could think of. Emptying every cache known to man. Resetting route tables, hard-mapping DNS servers, re-installing the Windows modem connection. I even changed carriers, switching to the more reliable and better coverage of TELSTRA  ... there wasn't much I didn't try.  In the end when I could no longer use a browser at all, I bit the bullet and went back into control panel and completely removed all traces of the internal modem (E770), the external modem (E220) and the EeePC 3G Connection Manager.
I re-installed the the EeePC 3G Connection Manager by running the AsusSetup.exe found inside the extracted 3G-HEM770-V2_0_3_824.zip. This contains and reloads the drivers for the Huawei E770 modem. 
Instantly upon restart and reload, all browsers were back to full functionality

 One other thing to note which caused me some consternation at first, is the way the 3G Connection manager configures the dial-up connection. It sets the Advanced TCP/IP settings to "Use default gateway on remote network" so if you do an ipconfig /all it will show the Default Gateway as the same IP address as the IP address of the computer, allocated by the carrier's DHCP
 
Any questions on this, feel free to comment on this thread.

3 comments:

Matan S. Cohen said...

Wow thanks dude, I've been searching for this application for hours!!!

Your link doesn't work btw, here's the corrected one:
http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/EeePC/Driver/3G-HEM770-V2_0_3_824.zip

Matan said...

Wow thanks dude, I've been searching for this application for hours!!!

Your link doesn't work btw, here's the corrected one:
http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/EeePC/Driver/3G-HEM770-V2_0_3_824.zip

Col. Sanders said...

In case Matan or others ever read this rather old post, an apology from the blog owner. For reasons unknown, only today APRIL 2014 did I get a "Post awaiting moderation" alert on the blog dashboard, for the previous comment Matan left back in JANUARY with the updated driver link!
(Thanks for the update)
I remember the email coming thru and checking the link to see if it was viral and THOUGHT I had approved comment publication, but .... anyhow its up here now in case it ever helps anyone else, though with the demise of the worlds best version of Windows to-date (aka XP) there probably won't be much call anymore.