XP or Win7?

[Cubieman]

I am VERY new when it comes to anything relating to hooking a cable to my M3.
I have a current gen. laptop now running windows 10 but I'm thinking I'd like to buy an older laptop and just dedicate it to E46 M3 coding/tuning.
My question is what would be the best OS to run? Windows XP 32 bit or Windows 7 32 bit? I really don't know that I will ever really be heavily involved in tuning, but I would like to be able to do simple things like reset adaptations, program shift lights, sport button memory etc.
Please forgive my ignorance, with not a lot of work lately I thought I'd start the learning process.

[Da Jemster]

I'm running Win10 64bit and my INPA runs fine.

[Stepstools]

I'm running Win10 64bit and my INPA runs fine.

Same here. No problems with INPA, ISTA/D, NCS Expert, or WinKFP. Never figured out how to install ISTA/P but never needed it.

[terra]

It doesn’t really matter, you can make it run on nearly anything.

[Cubieman]

Well that's encouraging, I think I'll just try it out my current setup then. Thanks for the responses on my newb question, very much appreciated.

[t3ddftw]

Somewhat off-topic but you really have to hand it to Microsoft -- they somehow manage to get software designed for Windows 3.1 to run on a state of the art OS. And yes, INPA was originally designed to run on 3.1 -- that's why some version are 16-bit binaries!

[terra]

Somewhat off-topic but you really have to hand it to Microsoft -- they somehow manage to get software designed for Windows 3.1 to run on a state of the art OS. And yes, INPA was originally designed to run on 3.1 -- that's why some version are 16-bit binaries!

I'm suddenly tempted to load 3.1 in a VM and try to get ediabas running

[t3ddftw]

I'm suddenly tempted to load 3.1 in a VM and try to get ediabas running

I bet there's no FT232RL driver for 3.1 😢

[terra]

I bet there's no FT232RL driver for 3.1 😢

I don't think USB support was even a thing with 3.1. Could probably virtualize the "serial port" from the host and get it to work.

[terra]

Sadly for the oldest ediabas version I have (6.4.3), the installer itself requires at least Windows 95 or NT 4.0 Service Pack 3. Might not be impossible to get some components to work in 3.1 by manually installing them, but it's quite the pain to transfer files to an old OS that doesn't support USB and where networking capabilities is an afterthought. Even in NT, inpa doesn't seem to be able to call ediabas (I do have the path environment variable set correctly).

[t3ddftw]

Sadly for the oldest ediabas version I have (6.4.3), the installer itself requires at least Windows 95 or NT 4.0 Service Pack 3. Might not be impossible to get some components to work in 3.1 by manually installing them, but it's quite the pain to transfer files to an old OS that doesn't support USB and where networking capabilities is an afterthought. Even in NT, inpa doesn't seem to be able to call ediabas (I do have the path environment variable set correctly).

That's unfortunate. I wonder how it would do in 98 SE

[terra]

That's unfortunate. I wonder how it would do in 98 SE

Yeah I tried Win 95 and kept getting processor errors on boot since I guess VMs are too fast. Got bored after that.

If 3.1 can be made to work, would be interesting to see if that's light enough to run reasonably well on a raspberry pi / qemu.

[slithershift]

I've read that a dedicated computer is recommended for installing/running BMW tools like INPA, NCS expert, etc, because the install can screw up other programs on your computer. Is this a myth or is there some real risk that comes with running these tools? Should i not use my primary laptop for this?

[t3ddftw]

I've read that a dedicated computer is recommended for installing/running BMW tools like INPA, NCS expert, etc, because the install can screw up other programs on your computer. Is this a myth or is there some real risk that comes with running these tools? Should i not use my primary laptop for this?

There's just a lot of associated fluff that gets installed and runs at logon. That's why I use a dedicated machine for it.

[Dash1]

I've read that a dedicated computer is recommended for installing/running BMW tools like INPA, NCS expert, etc, because the install can screw up other programs on your computer. Is this a myth or is there some real risk that comes with running these tools? Should i not use my primary laptop for this?

If you don’t install the software correctly then maybe. But everything is pretty straight forward. The only thing that might affect other programs is ista when changing the sample rate from 16 ms to 1 ms. But that is easily reversible and hasn’t affected any of my programs