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Tell me I'm a fool for thinking I could possibly buy a descent unit for under $1k and I'll walk away. I'm seriously considering this. Add says no hdd, no hard drive disk? Is relevant software included or is this a plastic box I can use as a tire chock?
Well captain amerika---ignorance is bliss and based upon your question it is obvious you know very little about the MB diagnostic system---what you see is the C4 mux and cable set only---now you have to purchase\install the diagnostic software and a laptop\operating system to install!!
Do yourself a huge favor---read up on the system before you ever have a dream about purchasing!!
What you say about it being only half of the components makes sense to me and that's kinda what I was figuring.
It's a shame the diagnosis of modern cars isn't easier.
Get a dell d630 laptop
Buy mux and cables
Learn about the setup at *******
Get yourself a d630 disk image or build it yourself
Pay off the investment the first time you use it
Does it have to be a D630, cant you buy a new or recent comp like a HP with decent 8gb or more of Ram, its faster and doesn't hang.
Is the software computer sensitive?
Right now they are advertising the C4 n C5, why would they be using the D630?
Looked at a couple of sites, all could be had under $600 therabouts
Main thing I could see in researching on that ******* website is that the laptop should have a physical db9 port on it. The excessively old d630 laptops will have the port, as well as having been super common a decade ago. That seemed to be why making a disk image that people can just buy and jam into a d630 seems to be common . You have some dude installing windows on a laptop, then installing the diag software. He can then just clone disks all day long and make easy cash.
I did see a couple posts about a virtual machine running the software, which leads me to believe it isn't laptop specific, but I didn't get super deep into the threads. I was happy to see someone move away from the d630, so that gave me some hope.
As far as I can tell, you need these things:
1. Computer to run software.
2. Diagnostic software (star diagnostics) which you then install on the laptop.
3. Multiplexer box that connects to the laptop on one side and the car on the other.
4. Cables to plug into the mux box from laptop/car.
The roughly $600-$1k price tag to get setup to diagnose these mercs is a total rip off. You can get a Porsche Durametric cable for $300 that also comes with a download for the diag software. Install that on a laptop (not a crappy old one) and you are in business. Sorry for the little rant there, but it is a crock no matter how you look at it.
Oh I agree with the ripoff end of it. There is no reason it should cost you $1000 in components in order to plug one computer to another computer to see what it is seeing. There should be a software hack for the command center that shows you the sensors and the available data from the sensors in the vehicle.
You can certainly run it in a virtual machine. But it will be very very slow even if you give the vm lots of memory and dual CPUs... A d630 disk image can be found for free on *******.com and the d630s are dirt cheap nowadays.
I just picked up one of these systems shipped from China. Its is of OK quality, fine for me a hobbyist mechanic and I have 4 Mercedes in the household so I am needing to do more than maintenance at times.
I had check engine lights on the 2012 Sprinter and 2011 GL350 which was easy to scan and diagnose. It has the developer mode however I do not plan on using that. There still may be times that I would want to take it into the dealer for something, just now I can take it in with confidence of what the issue is and even call around and provide the component that is bad and get a quote on just replacing that part.
Really cool software. Its like seeing the rest of the picture you need to troubleshoot issues. I really like the Yes/No menu formatting for troubleshooting issues with full specs as you go.
Basing it on the D630 or ThinkPad T30 HDD offered up in the listing, you would still need to provide either of these laptops for the HDD to slip into. This "kit" looks pretty much like the first post with the only difference being the inclusion of a pre-configured HDD.
If you happen to have either of these old and crappy laptops laying around, it seems like a decent deal. Curious to know if the "external HD" is something like a virtual machine or exactly what that might be.
04-10-2016, 08:30 PM
