A fairly tatty IBM Thinkpad 600E.

Good ol Ebay should sort you out for the battery.

Good ol Ebay should sort you out for the battery.

Was just looking as it happens. It seems whether I go local or far away, it's

TBH I'd say a cig lighter converter might be more useful, it should work just fine and it isn't that expensive any more either IIRC

I'm doing a few trial charges and run flats to see what happens.

Edit: Last running time was 10 minutes from charged to flat, with a little bit of Windows XP tour it decided to take me on. Hoping that the more I flatten it, charge it, and so on, it will exercise the battery and maybe improve it a bit. If I can get it to about half an hour of life, that will do me to be honest.

Muppet here hadn't altered the settings for the power and screensaver, so after 10 minutes it was going into standby / sleep mode.

So, turned all that off and it looks to have a battery life of around 1 hour.

1 hour isn't too bad on an old machine like that if it is doing stuff.

Well, I left it just sitting on desktop during it's tests. I had a go on the pinball game though. Looks a promising £30 spent at the moment.

What sort of spec laptop do i need to use VAG COM with???

I have been thinking about getting an old laptop just for this purpose but am unsure as to what CPu/Memory/hard drive requirements are?

Cheers

Just need a serial port to use a serial port cable. My cable is the official ross-tech cable with the white box in the middle of it. The laptop need not be anything special. Mine's a P2 and it seems to run Windows XP OK - certainly better than the install of windows 98 on it when I got it first....