What preferred Laptop suits VCDS ?

Herm TDI

Vendor
Joined
Nov 21, 2001
Location
Richmond, Maine...The far side of Witsend
TDI
2002 Golf GLS Malone Stage 3, P+520 nozzles, 11MM Inj pump, Sachs VR6 clutch, Stelth Race Pipe, Immo Deleat, EGR Deleat
My old PC in the garage has at last expired. 😪
Served me well for several years.
Now it's time to move on to something else.
So without further ado here is my question.
What preferred Laptop suits VCDS ?
I don't need a 2K$ lap top to use primarily on my car.
A used laptop it often plagued with problems. Who would ever want "The Plague" ?
Something that will provide worry free seamless operation.
Something that is not as slow as a garden slug.
 

KrashDH

Top Post Dawg
Joined
Dec 22, 2013
Location
Washington
TDI
2002 Golf
My old PC in the garage has at last expired. 😪
Served me well for several years.
Now it's time to move on to something else.
So without further ado here is my question.
What preferred Laptop suits VCDS ?
I don't need a 2K$ lap top to use primarily on my car.
A used laptop it often plagued with problems. Who would ever want "The Plague" ?
Something that will provide worry free seamless operation.
Something that is not as slow as a garden slug.
FWIW, I have a powerful laptop for the daily driver and I have a dedicated laptop for VCDS and MMPS/working on vehicles. It works great and it's a laptop and tablet so you can use VCDS as a touch screen too if you want. It's not blazing fast but it works for duties listed above as well as the interwebs and other non memory crunching tasks. It's a pretty small guy so it's nice for taking along on the ride for things like logging. As far as not being buggy, just make sure it's wiped and there's a fresh install of Windows. Mine has been trouble free since I purchased it (used)

Here's the specs:
Dell Venue 11 Pro 7139 10.8"
Core i5-4300Y 1.60GHz
8GB Ram
256GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
Keyboard

I believe these things were hot in 2014-ish







I paid $180 for it on Ebay. Was completely wiped with Win 10 pro installed.
 

DivineChaos

Top Post Dawg
Joined
Jul 27, 2019
Location
Minnesota
TDI
mk6 jetta sportwagen tdi
I've got a cheap Dell tablet that works. My old Emerson still works. Just got too slow on win 10
 

Searcher2

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 9, 2014
Location
Bossier City La.
TDI
'98 Beetle tdi
I use a old gateway running windows XP
Same here. My wife's laptop is windows 10 and I couldn't get it to work with vcds. I went on craigslist and called about a used laptop. She told me it was win 10 and i said I couldn't use it, that I was looking for xp. She had one that she thought no body would want. I got it for 25 bucks and been using it for years for vcds.
 

Mpaw

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 21, 2018
Location
Europe
TDI
Caddy 2005 1,9 105 ps; Polo 2015 90PS Bluemotion, T5 2.5 5cyl
I use an old laptop for VCDS and it runs ok - it's just very slow but because I put windows 10 on it (slowness due to windows rather than VCDS
 

oilhammer

Certified Volkswagen Nut & Vendor
Joined
Dec 11, 2001
Location
outside St Louis, MO
TDI
There are just too many to list....
You can buy a used laptop and have it reformatted so the OS is essentially like a new machine. But a new machine that will run VCDS is pretty cheap anyway. Only downside is that they often have a lot of bloaty spyware and such on them, so it is often worthwhile to have someone who knows how to get rid of some of that stuff to do so.

My issue had always been batteries in the past. I used an IBM Thinkpad for a LONG time, running Windows 98 SE. I went through three batteries on it, and when it started to get to a point once again that I could not reliably go on a test drive for fear of it shutting off, I went and bought an Asus EeePC. That worked fantastic, and it was light weight and smaller, battery life was really good as it was all solid state and had no optical drive (was too small for one). It was only $260 brand new. But alas, its battery eventually wore out, I replaced it once (was $100!), and when it died, I opted once again to buy a new machine. This one is a Dell Inspiron, similar setup to what is pictured above, with the flip around touch screen which is pretty handy. It has had a few bugs but my best friend is a professional IT guy so he is always able to figure it out. I think it was less than $400 brand new.

I use mine every day...
 

Mongler98

Top Post Dawg
Joined
Mar 23, 2011
Location
COLORADO (SE of Denver)
TDI
98 Jetta TDI AHU 1.9L (944 TDI swap in progress) I moved so now i got nothing but an AHU in a garage on a pallet.
The one thread was enough in the obd area!
Smh
 

Genesis

Top Post Dawg
Joined
Feb 26, 2003
Location
Sevier County TN
TDI
'03 Jetta Wagon
I have an old X220 which works just fine. And a newer X1 Carbon. Doesn't really matter, VCDS worked fine on the X220 many years ago, so.... yeah.
 

gforce1108

Top Post Dawg
Joined
Aug 2, 2006
Location
Newburgh, NY
TDI
04 Jetta GLS BEW, 14 Audi A7 V6 TDI, 13 Porsche Cayenne V6 TDI
I've used all sorts from windows 98 through windows 10. An older Acer netbook was excellent - until it fell off my motorcycle... I did have to buy an older WIndows 7 laptop to run vagtacho. I had upgraded it to Windows 10 (mistake) and couldn't revert. I was recently thinking of getting a Microsoft Surface tablet but have not really found the need.

Ross-tech did give me some updated info when I was looking: "All Surface Pro models (including that Pro X with ARM64) are compatible - ranging from Windows 7, through 8 and 10 to 11."
 
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