I've had the same experience with one of those cheap "mobile broadband" USB dongles that have flooded the market. Windows: plug in the dongle, wait for it to p

I've had the same experience with one of those cheap "mobile broadband" USB dongles that have flooded the market. Windows: plug in the dongle, wait for it to pretend to be a CD drive and auto-run an installer, wait for the flaky Vodafone installer to put on various drivers and bits of proprietary software (took about 15 minutes on my machine), reboot, plug the thing back in again, wait for Windows to recognise it, load up the slow Vodafone software and connect. Ubuntu: plug in the dongle, wait for a dialog box to appear, select your country and provider (eg. UK, Vodafone), connect. I find with Ubuntu that if it works, it works better than Windows. But if your piece of hardware doesn't work straight away, it'll be a bugger to get working.