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I always recommend people get their DICE unit from obd2express.co.uk instead of AliExpress and EBAY. obd2express units all seem fine with helpful customer service. Mine shipped "free" from China in like 3 days.

If you have VIDA 2013D or 2014 then Vista or Win7 should be fine, either 32 or 64 bit. The installer might complain about not enough RAM but you can hack an INI file to change that check. In reality it runs fine in a VM with only 1.5GB of RAM if you install and run NOTHING ELSE.

Older versions of VIDA can run fine however I found that the DICE driver was only happy with 32 bit windows so that's what I run right now, but I haven't tried the newer stuff in quite some time.

But yeah, the nice thing about a dedicated laptop of VM is that you can pretty easily just install different versions of Windows until you find one that works fine.

Also, if you upgrade IE beyond IE8 you may have problems, though some people have said that the IE8 emulation mode on IE10 or 11 can work okay.

I just park my car in the driveway and let the engine run (idle) when playing with VIDA for more than a few minutes.

There are actually lots of things that require the engine running anyway (like the VVT test... hooo boy!)

I get the fun of figuring out how to keep from draining your battery while playing with the darn thing! There are some special car chargers out there that can operate in a "Power supply mode" for up to 7.5A of power that would allow you to be hooked up to the battery and keep from running it down so fast or at all (CTEK makes what looks like the best one for $110). DON'T use a regular battery charger! I've toyed with using a couple of battery booster boxes hooked up on parrallel to the car battery for this. The dealers apparently have a 25A or 30A Power Supply box (~$300) that can operate like this and also double as a mighty battery charger in various charger modes as well.

Using Volvo Vida Dice, besides diagnosing check engine lights and funky problems. I can do anything a dealer can do, basically. Even software downloads, though you'd need to actually buy a legit VIDA subscription for that. But beyond that, you can do anything a dealer can do "for free" (after initial one time investment in the DICE hardware).