NodeMobile Huawei E169 Error: “the device has been disconnected or is unavailable”

I’ve been using a Huawei E169 3G stick on my laptop to access Internode’s NodeMobile wireless broadband services for a while now. The other day I got an error saying “the device has been disconnected or is unavailable”.

I’ve seen this error before, sometimes the USB port gets a bit confused and unplugging and re-plugging the device, or moving it to a new USB port. I have also occasionally had to reboot the machine to get it working.

This time it just wouldn’t work – I rebooted several times, tried a few different things, but could not make it recognise the device.

I Googled the error message and came up with a blog from China: Huawei E169G the device has been disconnected or is unavailable error … which gave me some other ideas to try – specifically, reloading the drivers.

I found the drivers for my device in C:\Program Files\Wireless Broadband\Driver … I ran the DriverSetup.exe program and then tried again and it worked.

Hopefully this post helps someone else if they have problems with their Huawei E169 stick too!