Qualcomm WWAN Device on Windows 7

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HP Elitebook 6930p and 2530p notebooks are standard models that are purchased when a Data^#3 user orders a new notebook. Generally speaking we had very little trouble sorting out drivers to support Windows 7 on these devices; until it came to the onboard Qualcomm Wireless WAN device.  What a nightmare.

Luckily for us, we aren’t the first to come across this challenge.

It should have been as simple as:

1.       Install the HP Wireless Assistant

2.       Install the HP Multi WWAN Driver

3.       Install the HP Connection Manager

I found two blogs that helped me get this over the line: The Mobile Broadband Team Blog and Josh Perry’s post about Qualcomm Gobi WWAN Card on Windows 7.

To get it to work, I automated the following steps and included them as conditional items in an SCCM 2007 task sequence:

1.       Install the HP Wireless Assistant Version 3.00 K2

2.       Extract the HP Multi WWAN Driver package

a.       Replace DIFxAPI.Dll in the driver package, with the version from Windows\System32 on a Windows 7 Machine (see Josh Perry’s post)

b.      Install HP Wireless Broadband Modules

c.       Install Qualcomm Gobi Driver Package for HP

d.      Install Qualcomm Gobi Images for HP

3.       Install Vodafone Mobile Connect 8.03.0017.0

The reason we had to use Vodafone Mobile Connect instead of HP Connection Manager – is that I couldn’t get the HP Connection Manager to connect to the Internet. HP Connection Manager 2.0 successfully connected to the Vodafone service – I could send an SMS message; but could NOT connect to the Internet. I got this error message in the log when I tried:

ERROR.: HPCM [Exception] function
_THPWMServices_RequiresActivation, err= The system cannot find the path specified. /x0d/x0a

ERROR.: HPCM [Exception] function
_THPWMServices_RunActivation, err= The system cannot find the path specified. /x0d/x0a

These steps, with the Vodafone client, worked fine on the x86 Windows 7 Build. For the x64 version of the build, the workaround using Josh’s Gobiloader tool was required, and worked nicely – but not nice enough to deploy to typical users. Until HP/Qualcomm release a driver package that supports Windows 7, the 6930p and 2530p closed pilot users will have the x86 version of the SOE deployed with Vodafone Connection Manager.