OBDII Cables to connect laptops

[Adam Watson]

Has anyone got any experience of the cables that are available on eBay for connecting a laptop to the OBDII port on an A6? It seems for about £10 you can get a cable And software to read fault codes/sensor data etc

Is it worth having in case o a dreaded engine check light?

Adam

[Issac Hunt]

For £10 you are not buying a genuine product. Its a fraudulent copy if it sold as "VAGCOM or VCDS". These cost more than £10.

They are cheap for a reason - They don't work properly, They are unreliable, Whoever sold it to you will offer no technical support etc.

I bought one a few years ago and wished I hadn't. Waste of my money and no chance of a refund. I then bought the genuine article and haven't looked back.

[NickPicks]

I have a cable which I bought from ebay. It works fine with the shareware version of vagcom, and also works with the registered version.

Because it's not a genuine cable, ross-tech will not give technical support for any connection problems.

For £20 you can get a guaranteed working genuine cable from gendan, and you can use the shareware version of vagcom/vcds lite. That'll let you read and reset the fault codes, but if you want to do much more (measuring blocks, adaptations etc, then you'll need to register it for $99.

The generic cable from ebay might work - mine did, but ross tech won't guarantee it'll work, or help you if it doesn't. I didn't know this much when I bought mine, so I was lucky, but if I was buying one now, I'd pay £20 for a genuine one.

If the ebay listing says "with software", this'll be the shareware version you can download for free.

[shegan]

I got one about a year ago, they come with free version of VCDS, which will only show you error codes, you can buy the full version to run it with. the leads are known to burn out if the wrong version is used.

Without the full VCDS its not much use, you can buy a code scanner for about £15 which is more reliable.