The V8 Owners Forum -

Hi Guys

What spec laptop or a note book do i need to run the MS on?

Andy

the cheapest one you can find. An old one with a serial port is ideal but USB only can be coped with if you get a USB-Serial adapter. Look up the MS forums for recomendations on this as they don't all work the same.

Thanks,

i have ordered a serial adapter with the kit,

what windows does the MS work with best

Andy

only ever used it on XP myself. Word of warning, if your going Vista your going to need a pretty heavy duty laptop anyway. Duel core 2GB or ram minimum. If your buying new and can wait then hang on till end of year for windows 7 comes out. Its far better than Vista (I am a Microsoft tech net beta tester) it uses less resources and generally runs far better. If your in a rush then get a laptop with Vista business. This has downgrade rights to run XP and any laptop that is built for Vista business flies on XP. If second hand then I would stick with XP, of course you can get MS tunning software to run on Linux as well if your into that kind of thing.

Any crappy laptop will be fine. In fact the older the better in some cases as the come with real serial ports. USB adapters are a pain.
I use both Dell Inspiron 600 or IBM thinkpad T22's - the thinkpads are well built and feel solid.
This is little Toshiba Libretto (P166 32MB ram, WIN95) that I use for monitoring and tuning (if desperate!). I fits into a docking station that's attached to the car - no AC adapter, just plugged the 12v straight into the back!

But that is really the lowest spec and its only really any use as a fancy dashboard. An old Windows XP laptop around 800Mhz will be fine. I was thinking of getting some of the early tablet PC's to try out.