New Toy - Old toy new way of using it

I had a technology epiphany today. I had looked into using my cell phone to supply an Internet connection for my laptop, versus the God awful expensive day rate WiFi in most hotels (at least the one's that do charge), and that had not worked out well for me until today.
Whew Boy Howdy! I have a new toy and a way to get to the Internet where ever I have 3G service, and it works pretty well. I just wish that the inter-computing hardware recognition was better. It seems that for the laptop to interface properly, you have to have the "Sync" cable connected and this spawns the "Active Sync" application, and then you have to connect, disconnect, re-connect, blah, blah, blah.......

There should just be a better way. It could be a question of Windows. Treo phone and XP laptop. I am looking forward to trying my virtual Linux connection and see if the interface to the phone detects and allows the USB connection. If that is possible, I may never (or almost never) use the XP interface on the laptop again.

So I will play around and see what happens.