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So if i buy a VCDS/Vagcom, this will tell me what faults the engine management light is lit up for ?

I've read you can buy a reader for around £50-£70 , but it seems a genuine ross-tech VCDS will be better ?
which do i get though ?
http://www.gendan.co.uk/product_VCHU.html ?

I can make use of it on our passat and polo as well i presume?.
thanks in advance

Save your money and get the Real thing. Its worth its weight in gold. It works on any VAG car and you get the full support of ROSS-TECH. With the cheap cables you get what you pay for, meaning very limited capabilities and no support..................

ahoooga wrote: which do i get though ?
http://www.gendan.co.uk/product_VCHU.html ?

Yup, that's the one. Or you can get it here which is where I got mine from:

http://www.ilexa.co.uk/acatalog/vagcom.html

ahoooga wrote: I can make use of it on our passat and polo as well i presume?.
thanks in advance

Yup, that's the beauty of it. It'll also act as an OBD2 reader so you can use it on any car after 1996 (but only for the OBD2 compliant stuff, of course).

thanks both , you've confirmed for me what i was thinking.
waiting on news about one, and hopefully this week will be able to confirm i bought one

Why would he buy from Yankland? Correction, "Warmly welcome to Chongqing Zhonglanshen Technology Co., Ltd". I bought mine from Gendan and Ilexa are a known seller too. Bloody expensive but one of those things.

arron wrote:may be you should buy from http://www.xcardiag.com

YOu spend more time trying to get these fake cables to work than actually using them. Assuming you ever get it to work. Friend of mine bought one of these and I had to install a virtual machine with XP S1 on it just to get it to not crash on start up. Even then you could only use certain functions otherwise it would crash. Oh, and the sampling rate in a virtual machine was about 2Hz.

Still, you pays your money...

Just so that all bases are covered... whilst you can buy a VCDS cable (I have an original one too) and it does allow you to get quite a lot of detail including the logs and other settings, a basic 10quid OBD2 reader from Halfords will allow you to get the generic codes and reset the light.
This is better than nothing and you need to decide for yourself if this is worth the extra 200 quid.

a £5 cable from ebay works brilliantly with VCDS lite.

great value...

sweegie wrote:a £5 cable from ebay works brilliantly with vcds lite.

great value...

Can you reset service interval with vcds lite?

imacool wrote:

sweegie wrote:a £5 cable from ebay works brilliantly with vcds lite.

great value...

Can you reset service interval with vcds lite?

Why would you want to reset the service intervals...when a service is due get it serviced...if the indie you use are any use they will reset the service interval for when it's due its next.

imacool wrote:

sweegie wrote:a £5 cable from ebay works brilliantly with vcds lite.

great value...

Can you reset service interval with vcds lite?

Yep, you can do that. There's a few things that the unregistered lite wont do, and it may not show you all the module coding options, but for simple stuff it's the best five quid you'll spend IMO

bakustax wrote: Why would you want to reset the service intervals...when a service is due get it serviced...if the indie you use are any use they will reset the service interval for when it's due its next.

Can be handy if the indy you use is yourself

bakustax wrote:

imacool wrote:

sweegie wrote:a £5 cable from ebay works brilliantly with vcds lite.

great value...

Can you reset service interval with vcds lite?

Why would you want to reset the service intervals...when a service is due get it serviced...if the indie you use are any use they will reset the service interval for when it's due its next.

I always service my car when due, that's not the problem.
On my diesel the service book says either flexible intervals 19k miles (2 years) or fixed 10k miles (one year), depending on the oil used. I want to be on fixed intervals. Problem is when setting the intervals, the VCDS only allows 5k miles for fixed intervals. Don't ask me why, that's how it is.
So I'd rather have a full control over the intervals setting and prevent any fault/warning codes to be written in the memory because I went 1k over the interval settings, even knowing the oil was still perfectly OK (5k+1k is still less than recommended 10k).

Problem now sorted as I've bought a year old second hand ilexa hex-usb+can off ebay and it works well. I can now reset the service intervals in 3min, plus do a lot of other things without losing time and money to pay someone else to do it.

Anyway, thanks for your opinion.

sweegie wrote:

bakustax wrote: Why would you want to reset the service intervals...when a service is due get it serviced...if the indie you use are any use they will reset the service interval for when it's due its next.

Can be handy if the indy you use is yourself