Until yesterday, I had an old Pentium 1 MMX laptop with 32Mb of RAM and a 10Gb hard disk which has been configured for datalogging with ECM852 using an adapter I made myself, analyzing and modifying bins with TunerPro, and the Xtronics Romulator's app for uploading bins. All this thanks to a physical serial port on the laptop.

Now that my car is ready to start tuning, first windows 98 decided to have a registry crash. I still had DOS, so I could still use ECM852 right. But right then my display's backlight died in a puff of smoke! I was so desperate to use it, that I was able to read putting my cells' LED light at an angle. Not happy with that, my AC adapter's cable got torn from the weird connector!!! Can you say angry!! That laptop hates me!

Enough with the rant.

So my "daily driver" laptop has windows 7, 4Gb of RAM, 500Gb of HD, etc. and only USB ports. Will I be able to install, run and datalog on this machine if I buy a serial to USB converter? I could also create a virtual machine inside windows (using virtual box) and install windows 98 if necessary, passing the complete USB control to it.

If this doesn't work, I can get a hold of an older machine which does have a physical serial port on it. But unfortunately it has Windows XP installed, and there is no way of reinstalling it because the CDROM is dead, the USB port is not bootable, and it doesn't have a floppy drive either. Can I do anything with this XP machine?

Any ideas are welcome.

 

If you go the USB adapter route, make sure you get a good one. A search in the forum will bring up results of adapters that work, and ones that don't or are flaky at best.

ECM852 won't work due to lack of DOS, but Tuner Pro RT will, with the correct ADS/ADX loaded.

About the XP machine, I have not seen an XP laptop that couldn't be configured to boot from a CD rom plugged into the USB port. You may just have to change the boot device order.

 

I got a Serial --> USB convertor from Staples on a whim as I had a gift card and it's worked flawlessly for me so far with Win7 x64 and EASE Scan Tool. I figured for sure since it was just some brick and mortar rebranded converter it would fail me, but so far so good.