I have a 07 XK and absolutely love the car and plan on keeping it long term. I do my own maintenance and have used dealer-level computers on my other cars, and would like to get the same for my XK. What do I need in terms of software and hardware? Just SDD? Or do I need SDD and Pathfinder? What hardware do I need? Thanks in advance!

 

A dedicated SDD laptop and either a DA Dongle or a Mongoose cable. Oh, and a 40 Amp battery charger.
There is a forum in JF.C dedicated to SDD, you'll find a whole crapload of info in there.

 

+1

SDD is sufficient for all years of X150.

Pathfinder only becomes essential for later JLR models such as my F-Pace where SDD doesn't even recognise the vehicle.

Graham

 

As Cee Jay said, a laptop plus the interface cable (stick with genuine DA or Mongoose cables if you can as knock offs can be flaky) are needed. I run SDD v130 (v130 is fine for a 2007MY, my car is a 2008) on my intel processor Mac under a WIN7 virtual machine. SDD is an old application and GUI is tedious.
AUTEL and maybe some other companies make more modern troubleshooting tools with JLR specific software but I don’t know if these do all functions that SDD does.
The 40 amp power supply keeps the battery voltage up during programming as SDD won’t let you proceed without greater than 12.5 or so volts. The car battery is not up to a long session of SDD.
General Tech forum Sticky on SDD has lots of info plus many other SDD posts throughout the forums that may help you.

 

Absolutely agree with V7. The only good thing about SDD is that it's dealer level SW. It's pretty clunky by modern standards. Yes, it has a lot of details that you can only get on SDD, but you only rarely use.

I use Autel AP200 with JLR app ($60) for 95% of my interests and issues, such as OBD codes and simple reconfigs. For Autel, there's no real programming involved, so no power supply needed. I assume higher level Autels have, in particular, graphical functions and event recording, but haven't tried the high end. Though SDD has event recording, it's really awkward -- much better alternatives with modern analyzers.

SDD, OTOH, allows you to do complex functions like change the configuration or reload software into modules. For SDD, you really must have a power supply when you do complex loads. For something really simple, like resetting the seat config with SDD, you can do it with a battery >12.5 volts. Anything else, attach a PS.

 

buy the DA jlr vci or go thru bosch and get it that way. SDD v130 has everything you need for a 2006.5 XK and is all over the internet.