Hand held or Laptop

[wheels87k5]

I've been doing some searching and found that it's been over a year since this question has been posted.

With all the new technology since then, and prices getting more affordable:

What are the pros and cons of using the WinALDL program with a laptop compared to using hand held scanner/readers (autoxray, etc.)?

I have a laptop to use, just wanted some opinions.

 

[dyeager535]

All the reasonably priced scanners I've seen for OBD1 will do essentially everything winALDL will, BUT you can't datalog for nearly as much time, which somewhat limits you as to what you can deduce from the readings. Scanner is quicker/easier to set up quickly, and easier to deal with due to size, so good for things like TPS checking, temp sensor, O2, etc. Of course, TBI is so slow ECM-wise, that there are large gaps in the data feed that might not show the problem.

winALDL is cheaper, so even if you just use it for diagnosis of a stock engine, it's going to be better in that regard. Really shines for the (less powerful) 160 baud ECM's (early TPI, TBI) while something like tunerpro RT is much better for the later TPI ECM's because it can take advantage of the 8192 baud. I suspect some of the later TBI ECM's also had higher baud rates, but '87-91 are probably all 160 baud. Could be exceptions, depends on what you are dealing with of course.