Buying season I

In the following weeks me and my wife will be traveling a bit and mostly outside our usual places of work.

That means no net.

Or at least it usually did mean that. I bought her a Vodafone Mobile Connect Card, the 3G, not the 3.5G "broad band". I'm a TMN subscriber and she is a Optimus subscriber, but I went to Vodafone because they have better coverage.

The card was pretty much plug & pray in Windows, and we where online fetching mail in no time. Very nice.

They I turned to my Mac. The card brand is Option, and they have Mac OS X drivers, so I downloaded them, installed them and bingo, I was online also with my Mac.

I then tried to log-on to the VPN at work, but it seems to have vanished. I realized that the installation program for the card completely obliterates the VPN setup you had previously. Not good.

All in all, it was a good experience and we now have a way to fetch our mail in the next few weeks. Even with the VPN-fiasco, I would recommend this card to anyone in Portugal in search of a 3G connection. Personally I would prefer a phone-based approach but I didn't want to wast money on a 3G phone that I don't need.

The problem will arrive later, when the Macbook Pro arrives and the PCMCIA slot disappears...

Update: yuck, yuck, yuck... The Vodafone "Dashboard" erases my entire VPN setup every time I activate the card. And that is a required step in the process of connecting. Sucks big time, Vodafone.