Hi there. I'm rather new to this and trying to work out whether a hand-held diagostic tool like the U281 you can find on ebay or Amazon for about £20 is going to be easier, better/worse, simpler etc than trying to use my laptop and VCDS-Lite or something similar? I want to be able to read and reset all fault codes as a minimum and maybe do some other things once I know what I'm doing. I'm a bit confused by the options.

VCDS everytime, no contest.

Agreed. Although I do have a u581 I only use it a a generic scanner on other makes.

Adam