More solid techno advice needed

For my next debacle I have a dilemma with DONGLES for the internet. Sounds painful and it has been ............very. :laugh:
I have two dongles with two SIM cards.
Orange first. I used to be on an Orange PAYG scheme and after I cancelled the contract I decided to unlock the dongle and, indeed, I know I had done. I used DC unlocker to do it. That way I could use any sim provider.
I also have T Mobile dongle with a current T Mobile SIM card in it which you have to buy a day's (or more) use in advance. Not cheap but not too expensive so good for a day trip to pick up a Jimny, Vitara, Rav, or whatever.
Then along came an offer from Virgin for a SIM for a fiver a month which I thought would be a great idea to use in the now redundant Orange dongle. Slapped it in and hey ho, working nicely.

Then I went and upgraded to Windows 7 thanks to Google Chrome being a pain over XP. Now the fun begins.
So I plugged in the Orange dongle and it duly loaded the program. I went to use it and it said invalid sim.
WTF. I know the dongle works with the Virgin simcard because I use it on my tablet.

Right, I decided I needed to check that the T Mobile now worked so I plugged that dongle in and it too duly installed the software. And it was ready to go. Sooooooo, I thought - and this is after many hours of mucking about - why not try the Virgin simcard in that dongle and to my surprise it worked. :woohoo: I fully expected it to say insert a valid simcard.
AFAIK the Virgin simcard is EE and should be compatible with Orange anyway and I think the T Mobile is Vodafone but God knows who owns what these days.

To summarise.
The virgin simcard and the T mobile simcard both wortk in the T Mobile dongle.
The Virgin simcard will only work in the Orange dongle when plugged into the tablet.

The Orange dongle install uses a heck of a lot more space than the T Mobile

What is going on??

I think because in the past I have had both Orange and T Mobile loaded onto the laptops and the PCs it may be the program that runs it is just T mobile. I also had a program for Huawei but lost that too in the W7 install and can't remember what it was.

Can you just download the device specific drivers for the orange dongle without the orange software? Do you use the orange software on the tablet?

[quote="OllieNZ" post=162370 Do you use the orange software on the tablet?[/quote]

Not at all. The tablet gives a list of providers (I assume it knows them all) and I select Virgin from the list. It is instantly ready. It is so simple it makes me wonder why I want to use a laptop. :laugh:



It's a Huawei - aren't they all - and I searched for its software for a download. I think it is the E392 or near that. lol

ee.co.uk/help/phones-and-device/huawei/h...--switching-networks
Any help?