It was a reburbished HP Armanda M500, and solely dedicated to PFC tuning.
Bought it in 2004, so it gave 7 years to the cause.

Long live the new Samsung!!!!!!

 

Chuck, did you get another full sized laptop? We've been tuning a lot lately with a netbook and find it much more convenient. Other than the slightly smaller screen it has a great battery life, a solid state drive with less chance of failure and it just fits better in the FD's small interior.

 

Yup smaller netbooks with lots of battery life for netbooks is where its at.

thewird

 

lol know you guys making me want to take my lil sister's netbook when tuning

 

yeah I've finally given up on my 2004 laptop. I got a good Black Friday deal on an Acer. It's not a netbook though. It has a 15.6" screen. I spent 45 minutes uninstalling all the preloaded crap from the manufacturer and then I installed drivers for my USB-->serial converter.

Smaller laptops/netbooks are cheaper and more convenient to cram inside a car but they are harder to use for data analysis because you can't see as much. I actually use a 90s-style trackball mouse inside the vehicle because I prefer it to the touch pad.

 

Duty is shared between a 7 year old HP laptop and this:

http://www.exopc.com/exo-ui/

 

I did look at some notebooks but they did not come with an optical reader.
The cost were around $350. Adding the reader would cost more.

Found the Samsung RV510-A05US at Best Buy for $300.

 

Whatever you do, remove all search engines. Can't have the young whippersnappers thinking you can look things up in the intarwebz instead of figuring it out themselves, right? =)

 

Correction $250.

 

Removing "toolbars" and other supposedly helpful programs/add-ons does help improve performance.

Another trick is to go to the microsoft website and download a small program called "autoruns" (or just google it). Under the "logon" tab it will show you all the little programs loading up in the background that you don't know about. This includes ones that can't normally be disabled through conventional means.

 

With all my laptops/pc I usually just format to a fresh stripped down bootleg copy of windows. It works the best cause it doesn't come with all the nonsense that's Preinstalled on them. I've even done it to netbooks. They have their own version of windows

 

That is what I did to my old laptop do to being only a 500MHz processor.
Do not need to do that with my new one.

The DL is the bottleneck in logging speed with faster processors.

 

I believe it's cause Eventhough it has a serial to USB connection that it's still a serial at heart and so are the speeds. I wonder if someone programmed a pic18 chip to have real USB transfer speeds if it'll log more data in less time

 

Would an I-pad be able to be used for data-logging? Kinda looking for a good reason to buy myself one for x-mas

 

Not that I know of. Most available scan/logging tools for iOS rely on OBD2.

However... having my pick and pull videos and web access in the garage on my iPad is very helpful. That should be your one good reason to buy one.