thanks guys..I will just buy a pc with serial port and xp...vista sucks bigtime for this application..
I don't want to get into "who's the tuner thing"...he is prevalent on rexnet and looked upon as the man by many. He has done some machine work on the engine and has been very helpful to me from the other side of the country. I was just asking for help..

MIght be easier to do that but it is sort of extreme... Vista is a POS operating system, but I run mine USB-Serial convertor on my 4 year old laptop with Windows 7 and works just as well as it did when I was running XP.

Work is selling some Dell D530 laptops at the moment for 200 each or something, these have in built com ports and come with XP if your keen on a cheap unit. They were expensive once upon a time... might be cheaper to get one off ebay or something nowadays. I use them all the time to program Cisco gear and they do work well.