Carsoft
8.2 vs PA Soft 1.3.6
With comments on Carsoft 8.2.5 and PA
Soft 1.4.0 Free Demo
If you've looked around my web site you will notice that I know a little about the General Module 5 (aka GM5, ZKE5, ZVM). It has become the focus of a lot of my free time. In order to learn more about the GM5 I bought the latest and greatest version of Carsoft version 8.2 with interface adapter and cables which normally runs $399. I had previous been using a pirated version and interface adapter that I bought from a eBay seller in China for $40. The biggest problem with PA Soft 1.3.6 is the lack of any explaination of what the fault codes mean. I read that the latest version of PA Soft, 1.4.0, is much better and has descriptions, but, I'm not willing to spend the $1200 for a legal copy. Anyway. I hooked up PA Soft 1.3.6 to my car and read the codes out of the GM5 modules and got the following screen. It shows 10 fault codes in both decimal and hex. I know that several of them are from faulty door lock relays, but, which ones? I want to be able to read out the fault codes of customers GM5 modules, but, without descriptions for the fault codes it's not very useful.
That's when I bought Carsoft. I heard that it had descriptions. Well I got it and installed it on my Vista Home Premium laptop and it wouldn't work. Some problem with getting the security dongle to work or something like that. I then installed it on a laptop with Windows XP Home and everything worked fine after installation. So out to my car to read out the fault codes in the GM5 module. Boy was I disappointed. Below is the screen capture after reading the codes. It only read 5 codes and four of the faults say the same thing! "1-Base-module (GM) faulty". What good is that. From what I've seen Carsoft tells me even less information that PA Soft. At least with PA Soft I got the raw fault code numbers. With Carsoft I get half as many faults, no raw fault code numbers and useless description. Totally not what I was expecting and for me a total waste of nearly $400. It may work great for other things, but, that's not why I bought it. I bought it specifically to read fault codes in GM5 modules. I found another issue with Carsoft 8.4, but, I suspect it's present is all previous 8.x versions. It only shows up to 11 faults. If the module, the ZKE5 module in my case, has 14 errors, it only shows the first 11 and doesn't even tell you that there are more errors present. Another serious flaw to an already sucky program.
I just got Carsoft version 8.5. Just about to install it. I've tried 8.2, 8.25, 8.3, 8.4 and haven't really seen much in the way of improvement. The only improvement was that it does show the BMW fault code number unlike 8.2 version shown below which has the same number and description from 4 unique fault codes.
