I want to start tuning with either Tunercat or LT1edit and want to know what type of laptop would be best for this.

I have heard of people having issues using a USB ALDL cable and frying PCM's. This is too expensive to keep wasting PCM's. That said, I guess I shoudl be looking for one with some other type of port for the cable.

What would be ideal for a tuning computer? MHz, RAM, OS, What port would I need, etc.

I figured I could easily find a laptop that will be sufficient for this under $200.

 

All I use is a usb cable from craig moates. Have yet to fry a single pcm with it.

You most def want windows xp or 98. I would want kind of alot of ram if you plan to have a high sampling rate, which is really not all that important but sometimes it helps you figure out little bobbles in the tuning.

I will say though that you want a good machine, i think that crap *** laptops and just plain junky cables are as much at fault as anything when it comes to frying pcm's.

 

Your tuning computer, what kind of processor speeds/ram are we talking?

 

I had a 333mhz IBM with 256mb and it was not fast enough to sample faster than 7pts/second but it did have a built in serial port.

I now use a work laptop dual core something 1gb ram with a PCMCIA serial adapter and everthings A-OK... I've loaded over 150files to the same PCM no problems.

I would imagine something around 500-700MHZ would be OK for logging full speed but I dont know for sure.

 

My tuning computer is a dell vostro core 2 duo 1.6ghz with 2gb ram and some sort of upgraded nvidia video card running windows xp.

I use it for a whole lot more than tuning though. Work bought it for me i think when it was new 6 months ago it was $1400 or some stupid figure like that.

The old 1ghz stuff should handle it fine with 256 ram or so. Just so long as its not a buggy pos like alot of laptops are. Thats the key point not buggy or on the edge of taking a dump.

 

I run a 950 MHz Pentium 3 T22 IBM laptop, 256 MB of RAM, built-in serial port (IMO, this is the most important part), and I dual boot WINXP and WIN98 on it. I know some people never have a problem with the USB cables, but I don't feel its worth the risk. I do a few other things with it too that I use a regular serial port for, which is why I keep with the older laptop.

Also, if you can do it, I'd recommend doing a dual boot. I run all my tuning and datalogging out of WIN98, then use WINXP if I want to use it as a laptop for the internet or general use. That way, my WIN98 boot stays clean and fast for my tuning. I also have a imaged hard drive that I keep back in storage, so if my HD takes a dump on me, all I have to do is get another one, reimage it, and I'm right back where I started. I hate losing all my data just because of an HD failure.

 

I use tunercat and datamaster.

The laptop I usually use is a P3-550, 192M RAM, W2k. I also use a P1MMX-166 with 96M RAM, W98.