I can't hook up to my sprint broadband card
What about using a USB-Ethernet connection? In fact, supposedly there is also the possibility of USB-Wi-Fi. Or what other devices do you have? Perhaps you could use Bluetooth PAN to one of those for ICS? Etc.
BTW one detail that keeps getting ignored when we are told to make sure we have the "latest updates" is that when it comes to firmware updates nobody tells us how to know if they worked. E.g. it's obvious that some registry values get changed but is there
a way to actually query the firmware to ask it if it agrees that it
has been updated?
Otherwise for a guess we can look at the BIOS information shown by msinfo32 and wmic BIOS. In my case they both agree and the latter says its SoftwareElementState=3. WTH does that mean?
SoftwareElementState
How very reassuring!
And somehow wmic BIOS can also inform me that Status=OK.
So there would be a bit more information than what msinfo32 shows (but not much) from either wmic
PS>wmic BIOS list /format:list | select-string "BIOS|STAT"
BiosCharacteristics={7,11,12,15,16,17,19,23,24,25,26,28,29,32,33,40,42,43}
PrimaryBIOS=TRUE
SMBIOSBIOSVersion=2.05.0250
SMBIOSMajorVersion=2
SMBIOSMinorVersion=7
SMBIOSPresent=TRUE
SoftwareElementState=3
Status=OK
or this equivalent PowerShell cmdlet (where I had to know first what I was trying to find, unlike the above)
PS>Get-CIMInstance CIM_SoftwareElement | where CIMClass -match "BIOS" | fl * | out-string -stream | select-string -Pattern "BIOS|Stat"
also that one truncates the list of BiosCharacteristics for whatever that is worth.
FYI
Robert Aldwinckle