What should be on my 'must have' list

[beanwood]

Hello all

I've recently purchased a 2004 1.9TDI Avant, with Multitronic gbox.
Had I found this forum a bit earlier, I may have avoided it, because of all the issues with the auto, but I'm pleased with it at the moment - it's fast enough, very smooth, and excellent economy for the daily grind to work.

Can anyone advise please, what (If anything) I should be getting in the way of diagnostic tools and manuals ? I've been tinkering with cars for the past 30+ years, and realised that I'm NOT a mechanic, and most of my servicing will be done by a professional. That said, I'm more than capable of an oil change, pads and disks etc. In the Landrover world (I also run a Range Rover classic) the manual of choice is a RAVE CD. Is there an equivalent for Audi please, and a reliable, trustworthy, cost effective source?

What do you all have as your 'bare minimum' Audi specific kit to keep your cars running sweetly? Do I need a VAG COM (What is that??) or similar, and if so, how do you spot genuine against copy, and does it matter? Oh so many questions....

[kid-jensen]

If your conscience can handle it, there's unofficial copies of ELSAWIN (CD-DVD with service manuals installed) on Ebay for about a tenner.

Also on Ebay, there's limited functionality VAG-COM cables with the Shareware version of the communication software thrown-in. Think they're about 25 quid..

The official Software is available from Ross-tech.com, but I've no idea how much....I'd say anything up to ton would still be worth going for because of the added functionality and the support that Ross-tech will then give.

There's not much diagnostics you can do without even basic tools like these.

[pete99]

As mentioned in above post ELSAWIN CD-DVD. I bought one yesterday .
Unfortunately- my brain must have been in 'limp mode' and i never read the suitability of it for certain PC operating systems.

I only have standard windows XP--so- it wont work on mine.

So- anybody on this A6 C5 forum who can make use of it- is very welcome to it --for FREE.

Send a personal mail to me with your address and I will post it on to you .

Pete

[Toonmania]

As mentioned in above post ELSAWIN CD-DVD. I bought one yesterday .
Unfortunately- my brain must have been in 'limp mode' and i never read the suitability of it for certain PC operating systems.

I only have standard windows XP--so- it wont work on mine.

So- anybody on this A6 C5 forum who can make use of it- is very welcome to it --for FREE.

Send a personal mail to me with your address and I will post it on to you .

Pete

what operating systems does it say it's for??

[westfield1962]

If your good with the spanners there is not much you wont find out how to do on this site, there are some very good tech guys on here only too willing to give advice.

[beanwood]

As mentioned in above post ELSAWIN CD-DVD. I bought one yesterday .
Unfortunately- my brain must have been in 'limp mode' and i never read the suitability of it for certain PC operating systems.

I only have standard windows XP--so- it wont work on mine.

So- anybody on this A6 C5 forum who can make use of it- is very welcome to it --for FREE.

Send a personal mail to me with your address and I will post it on to you .

Pete

What a kind offer. Unfortunately for me, I've already taken the advice, and bought one from Ebay...

[NickPicks]

Vag com (now called VCDS) comes in two versions:

For a car with CanBus (post 2004 I think), you'll need a dongle interface cable (the cable tells the software it is legally licenced), which you can only get from ross-tech, or from their licenced dealers (gendan or ilexa) This would be £268 from gendan.

For earlier cars, you just need a 'dumb interface' cable, which you can get from gendan for £20, or ebay for about £15 (the gendan ones are guaranteed to work with vag-com). The VCDS Lite / vagcom 409 software is shareware, so you can do basic stuff for free, but licencing it costs $99 from ross-tech.

as far as workshop manuals go, the only legal options are Bentley manuals from the USA, or an incredibly expensive Erwin, which is the publicly available version of Elsawin (which is only for Audi dealers). The versions discussed above are probably copies which I don't think are supposed to be discussed here. Having said that, I'm sure I've seen elsawin running on XP at my local dealers.

[Issac Hunt]

I have ELSA running just fine on my XP machine.

[pete99]

I have ELSA running just fine on my XP machine.

Hey Issac,
Now- so do I . All due to Peter Ds help and his insistance that it would work on normal XP. (even though it said in the instructions it wouldn't.
Took me ages to install it though--but looks as if it was worth the time .
Apologies to anyone who wanted the discs i was giving away . I feel a bit silly about it now