I recently upgraded from Windows 7 to the CP of Windows 8 and was surprised how well everything seemed to work. I was however having some battery life issues so decided to do a fresh install to make sure it wasn’t some driver weirdness left over from Win7.

After downloading and install drivers for all my system devices i was a bit disappointed to find that the 3G card’s (Ericsson F5521GW in my X220T) driver had installed correctly but that Windows 8 did not want to treat it as a broadband connection device. I could manually start the “WWAN configuration service” and then from a command line if I ran “netsh mbn show interface” I’d just get a message back saying “There is no Mobile Broadband interface”. Not great.

I knew the card worked fine in Windows 8 because it had functioned correctly before I did the re-install and if I installed the Lenovo access connection software I could make it connect to the internet but I wanted to uses the built in Windows 8 connection logic (MS have done some pretty cool things to support 3G connections in Windows 8). After some playing about I figured out how to install the driver correctly so thought I’d share…

 

Uninstall all other WWAN / mobile broadband drivers

From “uninstall programs” make sure you remove any previous broadband drivers & if needs be open Device Manager and uninstall the broadband device components. When your done you should see something like this:

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Download latest drivers

Next go to the Lenovo download site and get the latest WWAN card drivers – even though these are listed as “Windows 8” compatible they aren’t quite…

Lenovo Windows 8 beta driver site

Download and save the WWAN driver (83wo14ww.zip 6.5.1.5) – Do not run it straight away!

 

Compatibility trick

Navigate to the folder where you saved the driver zip file and extract them.

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Now open the “driver” subfolder and bring up the properties for “setup”

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under the compatibility tab open “Change settings for all users” and set “Run this program” as “Windows 7” then apply

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Now run a command prompt and navigate to the folder path for that Setup.exe file (make sure you get to the one in the “driver” subfolder, not the one in the level above!)

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Now type in “setup.exe /wNOAUTOSENSING /wUSELASTKNOWNRADIOSTATE” and hit enter to start the installer

You might get the following security prompt:

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Just hit “more info” and then “Run anyway”

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You’ll then get a prompt for elevating the setup & click next and choose the default options unless you really want to store the files elsewhere

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When it’s finished you should have the following devices listed in device manager:

  • Ports
    • F5521gw Mobile Broadband Device Management
    • F5521gw Mobile Broadband GPS Port
  • Smart card Readers
    • F5521gw Mobile Broadband USIM Port
  • USB controllers
    • F5521gw Mobile Broadband Device

imageAnd if you click on the “connect to network” icon you should now see your 3G provider listed..! (My connections show as limited because I was on a VPN at the time!)

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That was the last of the drivers I had problems installing on Windows 8 and everything now seems fairly happy and well behaved (with no missing drivers or unknown devices). If it’s of interest I could post a guide for doing a clean install but that would mean starting over. Let you know if there’s interest below. Happy Windows 8’ing