Sierra Wireless AC 550 on Win CE 5.0 ?

Two months ago, I posted here, asking for advice on unlocked air cards compatible with CE 5.0. Thanks to cmonex for the reply. In the end, we decided to try a Sierra Wireless 550 (USA Sprint CDMA) instead, which can be found very cheap on EBay. (I also didn't realize at the time that the device requires a 16-bit card.) The docs said that it comes with Windows CE support, but CE .NET...not specifically 5.0. The drivers are available on this page . Unfortunately, when I copy the .cab file to the device and try installing it, I get the message

"This application cannot run on this device type. Please install the application specific to this device type."

Not deterred, I grabbed a copy of Windows CE Cab Manager from here and had a look inside. It all looks perfectly normal

Processor Type: StrongArm/XScale (ID=2577)
Minimum Platform: 0.0
Maximum Platform: 0.0
Minimum OS Version: 3.0
Maximum OS Version: 5.0
Minimum OS Build: 0.0
Maximum OS Version: 0.0

and the device is running CE 5.0, on an ARM-XScale processor. But I really don't know what I'm looking for. Are there any .cab hackers out there? Cmonex, are you reading this? I assume it's just some fussy setting in the .cab file itself that's causing it to choke? Any suggestions on what that might be?

Otherwise, Cab Manager gives me enough information to install everything manually...but it also lets me export a brand new .cab, which is my preferred route, as I have 11 more devices to set up, if I can make this work.

Any suggestions??

This seems to be an issue with several CE 5 devices (including my RazorBook). Try winceloadext - it worked for me:

http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-Cupertino/2039/

It's about halfway down the page.

Thanks for the suggestion! I know some Japanese...but not that much, so in trying to understand what the program was meant to do, I found another program called CabPatcher. This alters the .cab permanently, and although WinCE Cab Manager now complains the .cab is corrupt, it installs and runs just fine. So I think we'll go forward now and get some more cheap Sprint air cards. Happy, happy.

You can use AltaVista Babel Fish, Google Translate, or Ask Translate to translate pages to English. With wceloadext, all you do is copy both wceloadext.dll and wceloadext.exe to \Windows and then double-tap wceloadext.exe. It'll allow you to tell wceload.exe not to check the CE version or processor version of the CAB file.