Vida or garage?

[Numenius]

I've worked on my own cars for years and am now the proud owner of an S40. After replacing the battery I got an airbag fault light. The car is in for its MOT and has had new springs etc done but my local garage cannot beget the airbag light off of course - there's no reason to believe there's anything wrong with it as various faults came on when I changed the battery so I suspect it's just a glitch. I cleared the codes with my standard reader and none has recrured, which reinforces this. So my garage suggests I find a volvo specialist to "reprogrammed the ICU" .... But it having not worked on volvos before I'm wondering of it might be worth investing in Vida now as presumably that's all the garage would use anyway (not being a millionaire I'd use an independent not a main dealer and the nearest volvo specialist is 30 miles away). O wonder what peoples thought are. We have np reason to believe that the airbag happened to coincidentally fail the exact second I changed the battery really.

[cheshired5]

Originally Posted by Numenius

I've worked on my own cars for years

Of course you should and you'll understand the benefits.

Why would you not get Vida?

[RS3100]

Can't help specifically with the Volvo SRS fault but memory corruption damage to SRS ECUs is a known and fairly common problem on Fiat, Peugeot and Citroen based motorhomes, often caused by allowing the vehicle battery to go flat or low on voltage (which is also common on motorhomes laid up on storage sites with no mains supply to run battery chargers and battery drain from alarms or other equipment on the vehicles).

There are several companies such as crashdata.co.uk and ecutesting.com who can test and if necessary repair faulty SRS units at a reasonable cost compared to the price of a new unit, and they normally don't need coding to the vehicle on replacement as the original settings are retained.

VIDA would help establish whether there is a problem with your ECU as a start though.

[Numenius]

I should point out I mean Dice too of course. But my point was will I be able to reset the airbag warning with that. If so then it will probably cost me less the going to a garage 30 miles away to do it.

[green van man]

I would talk to Simon, chesserd5 on here. He sells tested known working units and can tell you what they can and can't do.
Reprogramming often needs the live link to Sweden which costs the dealers £2500 a year for the licence so none of the knockoff vidal dice will program.

Paul.

[Numenius]

Well I have ordered an iCarsoft V2 device, the Volvo/Saab specific one. I'd like vida but online it seems people have loads of problems with running it properly and having to mess on with registry on my PC (Win 10) etc seems a recipe for problems. If the iCarsoft thing doesn't do the job then guess it's Vida/Dice, but I much prefer just to plug ' n play if I can.

[atnas666]

You can run a fee vitual windows7 machine on your win10 pc. This would mean no editing of files and is super easy

[pinballdave]

I run my copy of VIDA in a virtual machine. I downloaded it as a pre-setup Virtualbox image, so all I had to do to get it running is install Virtualbox, copy over the VIDA image and start it up.

When I got a cheap dice unit off eBay, all I did was plug it in and enable it in the USB settings on Virtualbox, and it worked straight away.

I needed it to be as simple as this as I bought my last Windows PC in 2004, so haven't a clue when it comes to installing and configuring windows apps on anything more recent than Win2k (and most of that has been forgotten as well).

[cheshired5]

Originally Posted by green van man

I would talk to Simon, chesserd5 on here

Unfortunately OP didn't and got their head turned with the "Vida is difficult" misinformation that's spread around, which is a shame.