Hi all. I want to be able to read the codes in my 97 XK 4ltr.
I want to read codes like the engine management, airbag and ABS and possibly, air-con codes.
What is the most reliable, cost efective kit that I can work with? I've recently purchased a JLR program that it looks like I need some connection lead that is going to cost over £300, so I thought that maybe there was a better route to this than collecting it all bit ty bit. Thanks.

 

You'll find one or two posts on the topic in this thread:

https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/g...-%2A%2A-33347/

Graham

 

You would not go wrong with a cheap ELM327 device and a phone app regardless of whatever else you get. Just a few $ off of eBay or Amazon. Of course this is just for standard OBDII, nothing Jaguar-specific, but super useful for emissions-related issues and real-time data capture.

For the JLR SDD/IDS software, one option is to get a Mongoose-compatible cable to convert the car OBD hardware to USB. There are cheaper clones out there for us occasional home users. British Diagnostics is one vendor, based in the UK. To my knowledge, your earlier car only works with IDS...

 

I can also recommend the ELM327 with Wifi- works great on my car and has all info I needed to check.

 

There's no totally straightforward way of doing it.

I agree that a cheapo Bluetooth adapter and "Torque" is worth a small amount of money (providing you have an Android phone).

Then there's a big leap financially. You will need a Mongoose Cable / Adapter and a Laptop running (I think Windows 7 or XP Pro).
It's worth doing some research - lots of threads and posts here and elsewhere but some options involve hardware and software which may not be 100% legitimate so be warned.

As fmerz correctly says, early cars only work with IDS so no point in getting software which is more recent as it will not improve functionality.

Have a read of this :

mongoose v130

 

Thanks for all the imput on this subject. I'm now a bit more up to speed on all things code reading!
I've had a read through that mongoose v130 thread and to be honnest, it looks like a nightmare to me. I know to get this stuff you have to go through some high jumps but there's a lot that can go wrong when downloading large programms and then transferring it all to another laptop.
I've had a look at the British diagnostics website and it all looks ok at a small cost, plus you don't need the expensive mongoose cable. I found a fair bit of review on the web. some good some bad but it was all over two years old and I've not seen any review that's anywhere near up to date. So that one is on the hook for now.
I had a RAVE workshop manual up until recently that ran in a v bubble on my old laptop but it was so unreliable on start-up I've dumpped it.
Anyway, I'll press on and see what else is out there before I make a desision.

 

I used the British Diagnostics kit on my laptop it worked in a clunky kind of way for a while, then I updated to windows 10 and it no longer works, spoke to BD, they said the only way to make it work is go back to windows 7. So have never used it since and have gone back to my old AutoEnginuity running on an even older XP laptop. However AE is also very clunky and unreliable.

 

Hi RD. Was the BD stuff running in 7 then? How long ago was that? I was thinking that they may run in the vert bubble like some of the others on a newer PC. I couldn't find a phone number for them or I would have phoned them.
I mean, you don't really want it to run a bit "clunky" epecially as you would be working on expensive on-board moduls.
All I want is a programm to read for the early XK. I don't need all the later stuff.

 

Just been on the BD site and it is indeed wrapped in some virtual software so runs inside another opp system, but I'm not a software expert.
Thing is, a lot of the indies are not keeping up on the stuff for the early cars which is why we are talking here. Could be that we will have to put up with "clunky" programs.

 

Well, you need to think in terms of being able to run old software (1990's) of the same vintage as our cars. Think Internet Explorer 6, plugins, etc, on top of Windows XP. It is possible to find an old machine to run this, but it is bound be become more difficult over time as batteries age, hard disk fail, etc. The other option is to run on a new machine but likely this machine will not run Windows XP. This is where the virtual machine manager comes in. The new machine runs Windows 10 and the VMM, and Windows XP runs as a guest of that VMM. Then, the USB Mongoose cable is "passed" or "pushed" from the host to the guest where it "appears". Even if this does nothing to alleviate the quirkiness of the IDS/SDD software, this solution will work for the foreseeable future.