Windows 2000/XP/Vista: Our recommended configuration would be Windows XP with 256 meg of RAM. You're certainly not going to have any problems with that setup or anything better. ECMLink works fine with Vista and Windows 2000 as well. And, of course, more memory is always better. But the basic XP w/ 256meg of RAM would work very well for you.

Windows 7: We finally (12/15/2009) got a Windows 7 machine in here to test with. It's an eeePC with Windows 7 starter (the most basic version of Windows 7 available). The current version of the application (3.19.49) does install fine on this box. But when you try to run the application, nothing happens.

The problem has been fixed in our application, but we have not yet posted the application for release. There are a few other changes we have already made to the application that we need to finalize testing on before we can release this.

In the meantime, you can simply select Vista or Windows XP compatibility mode and the application will start up and run normally. Just right click on the ECMLink icon and select “Properties”. From there, select the “Compatibility” tab and then check the “Run this program in compatibility mode for” checkbox and select Windows Vista from the drop down. Once you have made those changes, the application should start up and run normally.

Windows 98: ECMLink does still run under Windows 98. It requires that you use a slightly older Java VM (the installer takes care of this for you) and you have to install the device drivers a little differently (there's a video on the CD that shows you how). But it does work fine. We'd recommend at *least* 64 meg of RAM, though. And more will definitely be better. A quick hit on E-bay shows several recent sales of Windows 98SE laptops with 256 meg of RAM and PIII 850mhz process for well under $100. Those laptops, assuming they're in good condition of course, would run ECMLink just fine.

Unfortunately, we just don't have enough experience using ECMLink with these systems to really recommend a specific configuration. We do know, however, that you'll need at least Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or Linux kernel v2.4.20. You can actually use an older Linux if you want, but you'll be required to manually build and install the device driver from source. Mac OS X 10.4 is required because that's the version Apple introduced the ability to specify a custom baud rate (required to talk to the ECU).