I really want to get into PROM burning before I do any serious mods, but from what I've read it seems that to do it right you need a Scan Tool of some kind. I would love to hook up a laptop to my car, but I don't have one, and I don't think I can justify the cost of one since I'd pretty much only use it for my car. Are the hand held units really that bad? Do I have any other options? Sorry for the newbie questions. Thanks again, -Brian

 

You can get by with a $30 or $50 used laptop.

 

While on the subject, what are the minimum laptop requirements (chip speed and RAM and ?) for running WINALDL and Pocket Programmer software???

 

Grumpy is right, you can get a used laptop from E bay for under $100, the cheapest scanner I have seen is $179. The laptop will display more data at onec than a scanner, it can log the data, graph it...and as a whole it reads more data than a simple handheld scanner.
I got my laptop for $75, a P 120, 32 megs ram, 1 gig HD, nice big 21.1" screen. Running Win 95 it has not had any problems with the scanner software.

So, $75 for laptop, $4 in parts from ratshack for the cable, Craig Moates' scanning software or Winaldl (both free) total= $79, $100 cheaper than the cheapest sacnner I could find and easier to justify.
You can get laptops cheaper but be careful of what you buy and from whom.

 

I'm getting away with an IBM thinkpad p75, 16mb, and 512mb HD. It boots up FAST into win95 but TunerCat is slow no matter what. I usually have winaldl, pp2 windows software, and excel all open at once. I think anything less than what I've got would be a waste if used for anything other than Diacom.