I'm new to car programming. I just bought a laptop, tunercat, and a cable. I'm going to use freescan, is this good enough? My question is, are most of you using DOS or flashing pcm w/ windows? If you use DOS do you just need to boot DOS format on your laptop, and do nothing to your actual pcm in your car? IF you flash w/ windows do you just need to flash your pcm once or do you need to flash it everytime you want to log into your pcm? thanks I'm tryin to learn this, but theres ALOT of s***..... oh yeah I have a 94 z if it helps...

 

I just run the DOS app. Call me old school but there is less to go wrong. To be honest, I have never tried the Win version but some say that it is pretty stable.

Get everything setup to program and then just do a bunch of reads. I'm talking like 5 maybe 6 in row. You'll only have to do this the first time to test your laptops ability and your setup.
Once your fairly confident that you could do reads all day long with out a failure then run through the program process.
If a read fails your not going to kill your pcm but if it fails in the writing process you might not be so lucky.

Just be careful when programming. You'll get into a ritual eventually that your comfortable with.
I personally hover around my car telling people not to touch it or make any sudden moves but that just me.

I can't stress enough to make sure that you don't have any problems doing reads before you attempt to program.

 

I have a feeling you're a little confused about Tuner Cat and Freescan though.
Freescan is used to create a log file of what the car is doing while running and driving.
I use freescan and really like it. It give me everything I need and as you learn more about Tuning you'll be able to make changes based on what you see.

The read process involved with TunerCat is used while the car is not running.
Like I said in my post I use the DOS version.
In a nut shell, the read process grabs all the info on the PCM and stores it in a way that the Tuner app can read it.
Tuner Cat allows you to view the "Hex dump" (not important but someday you might wonder what language the PCM uses) of the pcm in a user friendly format.
Once you make the changes you want in TunerCat to the file. (Remember that the tuner is just allowing you to view the info in an easy to understand format.) You then run the Programming process to update the PCM with your desired changes.

One thing you'll find is that you'll constantly be learning new ways to do things.
Another member, Dr. Mudge, and I had a conversation a few days ago about some tuning.
At the bottom of the thread he listed a bunch of site that he uses.
I too use them but I just wanted to see where he got all of his info to make sure I wasn't missing a valuable site.
http://web.camaross.com/forums/showt...threadid=78181

 

I use DOS also, a possible advantage to the Windows version would be not having to reboot to get into DOS mode, maybe allowing you one more run on the dyno. DOS is diehard, Windows is die-easy. I've never tried the Windows version but maybe someday I'll get around to it.

To get into DOS you dont need a boot disk, although it may make it easier for you. You can select F8 at bootup, before it says STARTING WINDOWS, the easiest way to do this when you reboot is to tap it about every 2 seconds so that you dont miss your time window. From there just select MS DOS PROMPT. After that you can get back into Windows by typing WIN [ENTER].

I use FreeScan along with Excel, and I hide a fair number of things that will make the data take up so much space that I can't see what I want to without scrolling sideways. So what I dont need to look at, goes. If I know the car is warmed up I dont need to see the coolant temp, I dont need to know the incoming air temp (on an NA car and a typical day I dont care), things like that I will hide.

You can READ the PCM without WRITING too it, most definately.