If you have an HTC Hero with a flat rate subscription for data traffic, it is very nice to use it for your laptop’s internet connection as well. Of course, this is valid for any HTC phone or any Android phone for that matter, but I have an HTC Hero so that is what I can tell you about.

I don’t think it is relevant for this setup, but I have downloaded and installed the latest update for HTC Hero which is ROM Upgrade for HTC Hero_2.73.405.5.

I have also installed the HTC Sync software on my Windows 7 laptop (update: now also working on my desktop Windows 7 64-bit machine).

My current 3G subscription is from Telenor (Sweden).

Everything works fine on my phone when connecting over the 3G network.

So, in order to set this up I connect the usb cable to the laptop and then I turn on the following checkbox setting in Android:

• Settings
• Wireless controls
• Mobile network sharing

Windows immediately recognizes a new usb device and starts to install it but fails with “No drivers for device Android Phone”. What a bummer!

Trying to find an updated driver automatically also failed. So I started searching for driver files but soon realized that there is actually a folder on disk after the HTC Sync installation that is called “Driver Files”. It is located here on my machine:

C:\Program Files\HTC\HTC Driver\Driver Files\Vista_x86

So I chose to manually browse for drivers instead, and directed the Windows dialog to this path and what do you think? It worked!

Update: if you can’t find the mentioned files, I’ve zipped them together here (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, should work on both Vista and Windows 7).

Simple, but yet a useful tip.