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Beware - Land Mines !
Before starting up VAG-COM you need to be aware
of a few potential land mines set by the many foibles, and weaknesses of
Microsoft's core products that so many of us have to suffer on a daily basis.
You may be lucky enough to never encounter any of these problems, but here's
a few land mines to watch out for. My experiences are with Windows NT4 workstation
running on a Dell Latitude CPi for the record.
- First things first - Make sure you know
for certain which COM port label is assigned to the serial connector on
your PC. Simply dip your PC into BIOS before it boots and make absolutely
sure the serial port is enabled and assigned properly to COM1,2,3 or
4. Doesn't matter which as long as you configure VAG-COM to line up
accordingly. This is done from the Options screen, funnily enough.
- If you have a program like 'Hot
Sync' which is used to connect a PDA type device into your PC via the
same COM port as VAG-COM then it MUST
be closed prior to launching VAG-COM. The reason is that the operating
system lets the Sync software hog the COM port, and makes it invisible
to VAG-COM.
- You don't need to worry about
the COM port settings from your PCs control panel as the VAG-COM software
will override them on the fly to get the best configuration. But if
it makes you feel better, you can set the port to its fastest speed
(128k) with eight data bits, NO parity and one stop bit.
- Some VAG-COM users on Dell laptops
reported communication problems that were solved by minimising or disabling
the FIFO buffers associated with the COM port. I personally never
found this necessary on my Dell machine, but I did have the problem
below.
- Some PCs suffer from interrupt
conflicts more than others. Some Dell Latitude machines have such a
conflict between the serial COM controller and some PCMCIA cards. I
know of at least three people who experienced conflicts with a Xircom
NIC/V.90 combo card in a Dell Latitude machine. It is all to easy to
ignore the obvious sometimes, so if you plan on running VAG-COM on
a Dell (or encounter the 'incrementing IC' behaviour which means comms
are flaky) - save yourself weeks of torture and
unplug all PCMCIA cards before you try hooking up VAG-COM
to the car :)
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