Americas

  • United States

Asia

Oceania

roger_grimes
Columnist

Making Verizon EDVO work with Vista

Analysis
Apr 13, 20072 mins
Data and Information SecuritySecurity

I've been a big fan of Verizon's EDVO/Broadband service for a year or so now. Plug in a EDVO PC Card into your laptop or mobile device and get pretty kick butt Internet speeds. It's very pricey at $59-$79/mo. plus normal fees and taxes, but it gets great speeds and access. Since I'm running Windows Vista Enterprise on my work laptop now, I needed a way to get Verizon's software and the EDVO card's drivers workin

I’ve been a big fan of Verizon’s EDVO/Broadband service for a year or so now. Plug in a EDVO PC Card into your laptop or mobile device and get pretty kick butt Internet speeds. It’s very pricey at $59-$79/mo. plus normal fees and taxes, but it gets great speeds and access.

Since I’m running Windows Vista Enterprise on my work laptop now, I needed a way to get Verizon’s software and the EDVO card’s drivers working with Vista. As with most wireless phone services and features, the phone companies rarely update the software once released. In my case, the Verizon-provided software called VZAccess didn’t like Vista at first.

It’s a simple fix two solutions. 1) Just fool VZAccess into thinking it is running in XP, or 2) Don’t use VZAccess. Just install the card driver and use Vista’s dial-up features. Either option works. Keith Comb’s blog has an excellent entry on it.

Keith’s blog has both solutions. The ‘Running VZAccess in Windows XP compatiblity mode’ is near the bottom of the blog entry. And I’ll add a few things.

First copy the VZAccess.exe installer file from the CD-ROM’s VZAccess folder to your mobile device. Then right-click the file on the mobile device and click on Properties. Then click on the Compatibility tab. Then click on the Show settings for all users button and put in the admin credentials (if asked). Then enable the Run this program in compability mode for: and select Windows XP (Service Pack 2).

After installing the software and installing the drivers, you should have a VZAccess Manager icon on your desktop. Depending on your setup, you may or may not need to enable compatibility on the normal VZAccess Manager executable.

roger_grimes
Columnist

Roger A. Grimes is a contributing editor. Roger holds more than 40 computer certifications and has authored ten books on computer security. He has been fighting malware and malicious hackers since 1987, beginning with disassembling early DOS viruses. He specializes in protecting host computers from hackers and malware, and consults to companies from the Fortune 100 to small businesses. A frequent industry speaker and educator, Roger currently works for KnowBe4 as the Data-Driven Defense Evangelist and is the author of Cryptography Apocalypse.

More from this author