[Marty]

Many of you tune and modify the LS1. This requires a laptop with a serial port which is hard to come by and the add on serial ports from a USB may or may not work. I've also heard that programs like HPTuner don't like Vista which is the current standard. I was wondering if there was a market in the GM EFI tuning community for a remanufactured laptop?

There is a picture below along with a review. The specifics of what I have is 512 MB Ram, 80 gig hard drive, 2 USB ports, recessed serial port, and a DVD reader. The drawback I can see is they are bigger and heavier than a standard laptop. You could get a bar bones new mini laptop plus remote serial port for the same price. The Benefits are that you can drop them while running, will work after being driven over by a light car, and they are water resistant. This would help for the tough environments where cars are tuned. The parts and batteries are still available from Panasonic. It would come with a fresh load of Windows XP Pro but no Office Suite. This laptop was between $3500 and $4500 new and it would be around $450 used.

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/panasonic-...7-30676333.html

Would there be any interest out there?

[pknowles]

When I started tuning in 2004 it was hard to find a laptop with a serial port that wasn't one of those huge desktop replacements. USB to serial adapters (at least my Keyspan) work great and besides all modern tuning cables use USB anyway, so don't worry about finding a laptop with a serial port. I have HPTuners, and I've run it on vista and XP, never had a problem. HPTuners supposedly had issues when Vista first came out, but those are gone as far as I know. Seems the biggest issue was making sure you had the correct version of .net extensions. I think the issue initially with vista was that Vista has .net V2.0 and originally HPTuners was built on V1. They updated the code to V2.0 a few versions ago.

You don't need a lot of power for a tuning laptop. I use a 2GHz Pentium M with 1.5GB ram, more then enough processing power. Tuning aside, I like Vista a lot for my desktop, but not for a laptop. The disk I\O makes Vista way too slow on laptops. My mom has a 2GHz dual core laptop with 4GB ram and I swear my tuning laptop (specs above) with XP is much more responsive.

This post has been edited by pknowles: Feb 9 2009, 01:45 PM