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You might think that having use of a USB broadband modem free of charge is the equivalent of a license to print money.

After all, why worry about the costs of going online via the cellular network when you don’t have to pay the bill?

Well, I’m sure the folk at mobile operator 3 and 3mobilebuzz will be pleased to know that my use of 3’s Huawei E169G USB broadband modem has been quite minimal since I got it to use and experiment with in early April.

That’s not to say that I don’t think about costs. I do, every time I go online with it which is typically when I’m mobile with my laptop.

Even if there’s wifi around, I tend to use the modem (remember, I am testing it out).

I think about costs - and I have absolutely no sure way of knowing how much a given online session will have cost.

I can get an idea of how much time I’ve been online at any given moment, and how much data has flowed back and forth.

That kind of information is tracked and displayed in the modem manager application you see pictured here that you run in order to use the modem and get online with it.

Quite useful information, in fact, even if a little mental arithmetic is required to make some sense of it all.

In this example, I can see that I was online in my most recent session for a bit over 15 minutes.

I can also see that the total time I’ve been online since installing this modem on this particular laptop is a little over 5 hours and 41 minutes.

And I can see that total data sent comes to 11,046.94Kb while data received is 43,246.45Kb, making a total amount of data traffic as 54,293.39Kb.

A bit convoluted, it seems to me. When I’m looking at data allowances as gigabytes, I want to understand that more easily as a proportion of my data allowance depending on the plan I’m on.

The total looks like 543Mb, to round it up. Is that right?

And is that how I should be seeing it? As a total?

This is all great but what should also be somewhere on a screen in the application is how much all this is costing.

I’d like to see this application show me what tariff I’m on, whether it’s a contract or pay-as-you-go, and how much I’m paying (well, I’m not, but if I were a normal customer I would be).

It should also show me how much I’ve got left of my data allowance for the month, before surcharges kick in (and it should tell me how much those surcharges are).

A little multi-coloured bar graph would do the trick.

Maybe I could see all this stuff if I went online to 3’s website somewhere. But I want to see this kind of account information before I go online.

Even if the information comes with loads of disclaimers, that’s fine. I want some clue of where I stand with my account each time I load up the software.

When I connect, the software should check my account online and update the local account information before I disconnect.

And it should keep that data on the USB stick or on the inserted SIM card, not on the computer, so that I always have the account information to hand if I connect with another computer.

Security and data protection issues to consider, too, but how difficult can this all be to implement? Surely not that difficult?

I don’t think any other mobile operator provides such information, but correct me if I’m wrong. And if I am wrong, 3, please catch up.

To my mind, being transparent with pricing includes this kind of added value service. Good for relationships and loyalty, especially if no one else is doing it.

And on pricing generally, I see that from tomorrow May 1, 3 has dropped the price for its pay-as-you-go offering by 50 percent, from just under £100 to just under £50.

That’s really great, but I’d still want to see my account information before I connect.

I’m taking part in a trial of 3’s mobile broadband offering, courtesy of 3 and 3mobilebuzz.

What this means is that I get to play with 3’s mobile broadband service during the next three months or so, for free; in return, the folks at 3mobilebuzz want me to write a bit about my experiences.

3’s offering comes in the form of a Huawei E169G USB broadband modem, which arrived last weekend. It’s part of a good-looking price deal that 3 has just launched.

(Aside: it’s curious that, other than a few pics, I can find no reference to this particular modem anywhere on 3’s website. And googling it doesn’t turn up any meaningful info, not even on the manufacturer’s website. Is it so new?)

Obviously the first thing I wanted to do was to install it. I want to see how easy, or difficult, it is to do that. The little manual that comes with the package says it’s dead easy: basically, plug it in to a USB port and it will set itself up.

True plug ‘n’ play.

So after inserting the supplied SIM card into the modem, I did just that - plugged it in and let it do it’s thing.

How easy was it?

In a word… well, easy. I video’d what I did. Now, watching a video of a hardware or software installation can be a bit like watching paint dry: nothing interesting really happens during much of it.

But bear with me on this. The video is just under 10 minutes and it’s real time - what you see is exactly the process I went through to get the modem up and running on my Sony Vaio SZ4XWN/C laptop running Windows Vista Business edition.

It would have taken about a minute or two less if I hadn’t been wielding the video camera with one hand and clicking on things with the other.

Take a look:

I had no installation issues at all. Some of the screen dialogs could have been a lot clearer in terms of what you were expected to do. And as the video shows, there were one or two unexpected events.

But basically, you can be up and running with your 3 mobile broadband modem in less than ten minutes on a Windows Vista PC. I would imagine it would be a similar time installing on a Mac.

That’s what I call easy.

And what’s it like actually using the modem? I’ll be back in another post on another day with some thoughts on that.

Today, following an overnight update with a bunch of hotfixes and patches as part of Microsoft’s patch Tuesday for April, Windows Update offered Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista for my Dell XPS 420.

Although SP1 has been available since mid March, it’s only now that it will be offered via Windows Update in a more universal manner.

That’s primarily because there have been some technical issues which have now been resolved by Microsoft as well as by some software vendors.

I decided to wait for SP1 via Windows Update rather than grab the install file directly and do a manual update. The issues now resolved were quite complex; unless you’re at the bleeding edge or really know your way around the innards of Vista, it’s worth letting Windows Update ensure your PC really is ready for SP1, and then letting it install it.

The installation itself went wholly smoothly. It took about an hour in total including three reboots.

Once it’s all done, check the system information from Control Panel.

There you’ll see ‘Service Pack 1′ shown in the ‘Windows edition’ dialogue. I also noticed something interesting - in my case, this info now shows the full amount of installed system memory (4Gb); before, it showed only 3.2Gb. There is a reason for this which has been resolved with SP1.

So installing SP1 went without a hitch.

That’s how it’s all supposed to work, so my experience is a good one.

I did do some preparation beforehand including all the steps recommended by Microsoft in order to ensure the PC was ready for Windows Update to be able to offer SP1. This is especially so re video and audio drivers.

If you have any issues, you’ll be glad to learn that Microsoft is offering free tech support through 2009 for Vista SP1.

But if you prepare before deploying, you shouldn’t need it.

Version 2.5 of the WordPress blog platform was released a few hours ago.

I’m about to upgrade this blog to that latest version via the 1-click install functionality provided by my hosting service, DreamHost.They are exceedingly quick off the mark in making this upgrade available, so avoiding the manual upgrade process.

If the upgrade is successful with no issues (eg, with any plugins), I’ll upgrade my main blog within the next few days.

Everything should go swimmingly…

[Later] It all did go swimmingly. About 15 minutes after I activated the 1-click upgrade at DreamHost, I received an auto-email saying the upgrade was done.

A link in that email took me to a screen saying the database required updating. Clicked on the ‘update’ link; a couple of seconds later, I was at the site, all looking exactly as it did before the upgrade.

When I logged in, though, I got an error. Rather, I got a blank screen with a single line of text, a link to Technorati inbounds.

My immediate thought was a plugin error, specifically the Berri Technorati Reactions on Dashboard plugin. A quick dive in to the site via FTP and I deleted the plugin.

(I hadn’t disabled any plugins before doing the install, against the recommendations in the upgrade guide in the WordPress Codex.)

That fixed it - the login in now works correctly and no errors appear as this screenshot of the new dashboard shows:

Soft pastel colours are the first thing you notice about the appearance of the new dashboard.

And it’s behind the scenes that the changes from versions prior to 2.5 are really apparent, starting with that new dashboard. Lots more to discover, though.

So, a successful upgrade to WordPress 2.5.

A definite ‘OMG moment’ with a computer is when you boot it up and see an error message indicating a problem with your hard drive.

My OMG moment this evening looked like this:

Doubly alarming as it happened after both hard drives in the system - a brand new Dell XPS 420 I received less than three weeks ago - were replaced under warranty less than a week ago.

The PC did boot into Windows Vista successfully so the first thing was to make sure anything essential on the drives was copied to the network hard drive. As it’s a new machine, I have little irreplaceable on it yet.

The hard drives in the XPS 420 are set up in a RAID 0 configuration. A quick check online uncovered quite a bit of commentary where RAID problems, XPS 420 and Intel are all mentioned in the same breath, such as this recent discussion forum thread.

In any event, I called XPS Premium Support - something I hadn’t imagined doing again - and spent an hour on the phone and connected remotely with a helpful and knowledgeable service agent.

The first thing he did was visit the Dell UK support site and download and install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. What happens now is that the console confirms an error with the RAID setup as it now appears every time the computer boots into Windows. That follows the error screen at bootup itself - the screenshot above - which now appears on every bootup right after the Dell logo screen.

What the Dell support agent told me was pretty interesting. The problem I saw is all to do with the Intel RAID controller and nothing to do with the hard drives themselves. He said Dell will be releasing a patch next week that will address the issue, meaning no more RAID controller errors.

According to the agent, quite a few XPS 420 owners have experienced this same error. I don’t know the actual number but that’s pretty alarming news.

Whatever a possible solution, I have no confidence in any kind of RAID setup on this computer. As the Dell agent told me, setting up the PC with two normal hard drives rather than in a RAID configuration would mean no such issues as I’ve experienced.

Assuming the hard drives are perfectly fine, this seems a route that provides quite a bit of confidence and assurance, certainly more than I have right now.

So that’s what I plan to do - start again (again!), install the OS, drivers, utilities, etc. Need to devote time, and soon.

Although I think the XPS 420 is a great computer, this is not a promising start to my overall XPS 420 experience.

The Event Viewer tool in recent versions of Windows is a useful means to understand some of the things that happen on your computer, especially when you’re looking for why an error of some kind occurred.

In its simplest sense, Event Viewer records details of every single thing going on in your computer. What the operating system is doing, what applications are doing, what you’re doing.

I was looking for something just now in the event log for Windows Vista and came across some entries for the web browser, in this case Internet Explorer.

Take a look at this screenshot:

Notice anything odd?

The two red circles will give you an idea - a spelling mistake!

It’s "browser" not "bowser." I’d also give it an initial cap, in common with other descriptors.

If Microsoft programmers make a simple spelling mistake like this, what else isn’t right, I wonder?

Something to add to my overall sense of disquiet about Windows Vista.

Because I’m a podcaster, I use the Podpress plugin for WordPress on my main blog.

It makes it easy for visitors to listen to a podcast here and now - all you have to do is click on the ‘play’ image you see on a post that has a podcast available (see this FIR post for an example) and the podcast plays. It’s that simple.

It also lets you choose whether to launch its player in a popup window if you prefer. And you can download the MP3 file instead if you wish.

From the podcaster’s point of view, it seamlessly interfaces with iTunes, providing that service with all the info it needs in order to categorize your podcast and make it available to subscribers.

Podpress provides useful statistics on how many downloads you’ve had, whether direct from the site or via the RSS feed.

Yet I’ve had nothing but trouble with any version of Podpress later than version 6.8 which is what is still installed on this blog.

And I’m not the only one if ongoing comments in the Podpress support forum are an indicator.

The latest version is 8.8. There have actually been 19 updated versions since 6.8, but I’ve stuck with 6.8 as it’s the only one that always works without any trouble in my experience.

Recent versions of WordPress include a nifty alert in the admin page listing plugins which tells you when there’s new version available of a particular one.

Podpress is always there but I no longer attempt new versions. My experiences include much of what you see in the feedback topics shown in the screenshot. This is what you see on the Podpress plugin page on the WordPress plugins site - hardly encouraging.

I’ll continue with 6.8 until there’s a later version I can have some confidence in. Or until someone builds a better mousetrap.

What a palaver with this Xda Orbit 2 car kit!

After some Twitter exchanges today, fellow blogger-tester Sarah Blow posted a video in response to mine at the weekend re the difficulties I’m having in getting the phone cradle to fit with the pole thingy.

A brilliant video, Sarah, showing how easy it should be!

Yet no matter what I do, I cannot get this thing together. Here’s another walk-though (embedded below) of the non-result I keep having. Plus a view on what it’s like fitting it in the car.

The phone itself is great; some comments on that here soon. Yet my experience with this accessory kit, something that should be so simple, is not good at all.

Either the accessory is just badly made or I’m just too dumb to figure it out, I’m really not sure which.

Helpful suggestions more than welcome.

Last Monday, I received an Xda Orbit 2 mobile phone courtesy of mobile operator O2 and their ad agency VCCP.

So I’ve been playing with this gadget all week, trying it out mostly with wifi. It’s very nice indeed.

As a phone, it does what all phones do (let you make and receive calls) and it does that job pretty well in the few calls I’ve made, probably testament to O2’s good cellular network coverage.

Not received any calls yet as I haven’t widely advertised the number

As I mentioned in my initial post on my main blog, I’ll be posting thoughts about the Xda Orbit 2 here as and when I have some.

Today I do and it’s to do with an accessory for the phone that I found pretty useless, never mind extremely irritating.

Yesterday I drove into London and decided to try out CoPilot Live 7, the satellite navigation application that comes with the phone.

It’s good and I’ll have a post soon with thoughts on that. This post, though, is to do with the fixing kit you put in your car where you put the phone in a cradle so you can see it and interact with it from your driving position.

Assembling this car kit is impossible. Two of the parts just will not mate. I must have had a dozen attempts to try and do it, all to no avail.

This is one of those situations where you wonder if you’re just an idiot in not being able to figure it out or if the product is badly designed and/or made.

I think the product is badly designed as surely it should be simpler than this.

What exactly is this about? Take a look at this little video I made and posted to YouTube.

If I’m not doing it right, please let me know!

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself every time I check the results of any Windows updates, or do a manual check myself.

Every time, the screen shows this:

Ever since I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my Dell desktop PC last April, only one Ultimate Extra has ever shown up via Windows Update.

That one is DreamScene, and it’s pretty cool.

But that’s it. Nothing else since.

Quite a few people are asking: Are there any Ultimate Extras?

Love to see some answers from Microsoft.