The advice i gave was hardly general, nor was Kddsl's....but lets not labor that point. Practical first hand user advice is very valuable...often more so than what is offered at sale. You also judged characters, not my mistake. And yes, there are a lot of maybes... I see softronic has chimed in on that.
Anyway, Softronic clearly state there are risks. The linked softronic web info is also not news to me. I had that printed off along with protomotives instructions at the time and had my IT guru with me as well. Incidentally the info on the .2 cars was also not available at that time and it appears there has since been further clarification on certain points to help stave off disasters. The .2 car appears more particular on the 3GB requirement. Mine is a .1 as is the OP's and whilst the 64 has not presented as a problem for me perhaps if it was a .2 then it may well prove to be a different story. Soft info is still not perfect...eg computer must also not fall asleep due to stand by time outs....etc. It seems if the computer is old/low spec and doesn't process fast and the cache is reasonably full or of a small capacity it can affect the download...cause a freeze. Then try recover that. Im aware of the small file size of the tune but some things just happen for inexplicable reasons. As i pointed out, Softronic offers no garrantees on the advice or the process. You speak of diagnosing problems first....you wont even know what to diagnose once something goes wrong midway through....its too late at that stage. So its wise to start out with the right equipment, and the better the spec of your laptop the lesser the chance of **** happening along with having all the other set up requirements in 100% order. Now if you want to use a 1GB cache and a mediocre processor and rely on your IT knowledge then fine by by me.

 

Thanks Scott! (and Karim for passing on Scott's info to alert him to my issues and this thread).

Looking forward to your response - hopefully we can shed some light on this (my) issue

Mike

 

So... to all the experts, noobs, and gurus on the thread...
Just spoke with the Softronic Oracle "AKA Scott" and it appears that the problem is with... **drum roll please** the cable.

Apparently there was an issue with some of the older cables (not Softronic but vendor/manufacturer of the cable).

Solution:
Download the durametric software, plug into car and PC, make sure there is power to the cable, open durametric software, go to tools > check cable version, and upgrade the firmware on the cable.
...early in the morning here, so have some other pressing matters, but will be testing this evening and will update all as to the results.

 

Like I've said, I wasn't calling anyone a n00b, sorry if misunderstood. I was pointing out that some advices one may find on the Internet are just redundant these days and usually general advices one may give to any problem.

From my personal (and I may say normal experience) there is no reason for a 32 bit application with 64 bit drivers to fail under a 64 bit environment (I believe this applies to antiviruses, firewalls and many security software that requires a low-level type of access to the kernel, which is much more complex than a flashing program). Therefore I don't believe that a firmware update may fail under such conditions. A program that requires 3GB of RAM to write a minor file is clearly poorly optimized and the owner should provide general compatibility for his product. No rant here, sorry in advance, don't take it personally.

Now, can someone explain it to me: if a cable doesn't have any physical defects, why shouldn't it work? I've seen this problem a few times here on 6Speed and I've wondered why.

 

Yup, re 64bit vs 32 bit - you're spot on (speaking form experience building highly robust financial trading products). Unless you're making use of multi threaded apps, or relying on 2.5GB+ memory needs, both are compatible... But that's a whole other subject altogether. So lets put that to rest.

Regarding the cable, it has firmware, board/microcontroler built in to the female side (plugged into the car) and requires power from th e car. Hence it will require an update to the firmware if faulty (cable vendor specific, not softronic issue).

 

Just for clarification but don't you mean male side and drivers are installed using the USB connector powered by your PC (not car battery)?

 

Sorry, yes, male side - and apparently the firmware contained in the cable needs to be updated (it contains a small circuit board).

By the way - I'm still struggling with the whole process/cable... think I may just need a new one altogether. Can't seem to update it at all.

 

Do you have 1st or 2nd generation Durametric cable? Firmware on 1st gen cable is not updatable.

 

How do you tell if your cable is 1st or 2nd gen?

 

If the cable has the LED light on the side that reads "for use on: PORSCHE," then it is a second generation interface cable.

If the cable has the LED light on the side that reads "Enthusiast Version" or "Professional Version," then it is a first generation cable.

 

Scott, how can the system rewrite after a failure, ie avoid bricking?

 

Thanks bob. Just checked and mines a second gen. Phew.
cheers.

 

Hi Guys, just wanted to update everyone.
I've had success finally.

The cable (although an older version) turned out to work but needed to be "reset". Not sure what that means exactly, I'm assuming as Scott did it from his end, it involved updating the flash software.

So my process was as follows using a laptop running windows 7, 64 bit, 4GB Ram 2.6GHz CPU.

Uninstall Durametric and Softronic Flash client
Download and reinstall the Softronic Flash Client
Plug the USB in and then connect to the car.
Open Softronic Flash client
Switch the power on to light up the dash in the car
Hit the next button to start the process...
Whalla-Presto all worked!

That said it took a total of 86minutes to complete the process, which downloaded a file 1048575 bytes large. I'm guessing it took so long as the older cable simply doesn't have the fast transfer speeds (?)

By the time it was complete I had exactly 5 min of power left on the laptop and the car... well, all the lights were still on, but when I tried to start her, could get the engine to turn, so needed a jump.

Obviously when flashing it I will be running under power - that's for damn sure

Oh, another interesting thing is that as soon as it started to read the ECU I received an error on the dash "PSM Failure" which went away after restart after I managed to jump start the car.

BY the way, I should mention that Scott is a terrific fellow and offers excellent advice/service, with solid working knowledge. Was a joy working with him trying to resolve this issue!

 

Good to hear you finally got a read. See what i mean about the battery and charger?... and using a high spec computor? Just imagine using an old low spec machine....the battery would be unrecoverable dead.And btw what was the story with being given an old cable? I recall my initial read using an old computer took over 2 hours. You cant afford any of that happening doing the flash....thats when things can go badly wrong.

 

Yes, good to see you're up and running but 86 min, 2 hours to upload a file guys? Not saying it didn't happen but it shouldn't take that long. Something odd is happeneing. That's a baud rate of 200 bits/s. Morse code is 50 bits/s