It was a sweltering Tuesday afternoon in July when Arjun’s internet died. Not the dramatic, storm-induced death of routers past, but something quieter, more insidious. His desktop PC—a loyal but aging Windows 10 machine—simply refused to acknowledge the existence of his Huawei E5573cs-322.

The E5573cs-322 was a curious little device. Smaller than a deck of cards, it was a portable 4G Wi-Fi hotspot, the kind travelers used to turn cellular data into a private bubble of connectivity. But to Arjun’s PC, plugged in via USB tethering, it was a ghost. Windows 10, for all its automatic driver wizardry, could not see the device as a modem. Instead, it appeared as a generic “Virtual CD-ROM” — a quirk of Huawei’s design, where the device pretended to be a storage drive until proper drivers were installed.

He selected Modem Mode. Saved. Rebooted the device.

It worked. Windows recognized the E5573cs-322 as a “Huawei Mobile Broadband Network Adapter.”