Can you recognize me now? Good.

OK, so a coworker and I are getting ready to hit the road and head down to Knoxville, Tennessee, for CodeStock 2009. Our company has two Verizon Wireless broadband USB cards that we use for presentations and such, so I procured one as I have done in the past to use in Mac and Boot Camp Windows mode on my MacBook Pro. Little did I know the trouble I was headed into getting it all to work on both the Windows half of my MacBook Pro and on my coworker’s Dell Vista notebook.

I had Verizon Wireless Access Manager (cleverly acronymed to VWAM) version 5.8.2 on my MacBook from my previous experience with a Pantech CDMA UM150 card from Verizon. I fired up the software, tried to use the card I was given (a Novatel Wireless EXPD EV720), and it was not recognized. Here is what happened next:

  • Uninstalled VWAM 5.8.2
  • Downloaded VWAM 6.10.2 from Verizon’s web site
  • Installed said software
  • Tried to run VWAM, connected device, no-go

At this point, I decided to try and get a bit creative, think outside the box as it were:

  • Tried to run the NvtlDriverCDFilter_V2.02.07.002.exe application, which I found in the folder C:\Program Files\Verizon Wireless\VZAccess Manager\Drivers\Novatel
  • This component must have already been installed (perhaps by the VWAM 6.10.2 installer), but I went ahead and did the removal
  • Automatic restart
  • Tried to run VWAM, connected device, no-go
  • Ran the NvtlDriverCDFilter_V2.02.07.002.exe application
  • Tried to run VWAM, connected device, no-go

OK, so now I am getting a little perturbed. Time to break out the big guns:

  • Launched Device Manager
  • A yellow exclamation point is showing next to a Data Interface (a-ha!!!)
  • Right click on Data Interface, select Update Driver, and let Windows handle the driver update automatically, at which point the yellow exclamation point disappears
  • Tried to run VWAM, connected device, hardware reported as ready to use and the Next > button lit up.

And it is now working fine on the Windows half of my MacBook Pro.

Armed with this knowledge, I went to my coworker and had him do roughly the same thing. He had an additional snafu on his machine, however. Toward the end of the NvtlDriverCDFilter_V2.02.07.002.exe installation procedure, it came up with an error:

Error 2738. Could not access VBScript run time for custom action.

We did some investigation and found a posting in the support database for NitroPDF that seemed to address this error:

Q10106 – ERRMSG: Error 2738. Could not access VBScript run time for custom action. EDIT: Sorry, this link appears to have been removed from the NitroPDF web site. 🙁

After registering the VB Script DLL, and running the installer again, and running the VWAM on his Dell, the card seems to be recognized and connects fine to the Verizon network. Celebrate good times, come on!

By the way, I hate to make this sound like one of those “Hello, I’m a Mac/And I’m a PC” commercials, but the card ran smooth as a baby’s bottom on the Mac OS X half of my MacBook Pro. No software updates or driver snafus whatsoever.

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