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Someone think: "I'm not sure you can kill yourself with a thermometer but I'm pretty certain you can kill your car using a MB Star and playing about in certain menus."

My do not agree him all and point of view is: "Fair point, but it depends on where you stick the thermometer I guess! Like anything 'playing' around in an unfamiliar environment could be dangerous, but there is plenty of information out there via our friend Google, not to mention the simulator mode that could help the user to be more knowledgeable. However, just as it is almost impossible to learn to drive a car purely from reading about driving, the same goes for Star.

To be honest, I don't think there is too much harm that can be done via the quick test menu where most users would be spending 99.5% of their time checking and clearing fault codes. This is key to diagnosing and understanding the health of your car and can sometime reveal a critical issue in the process of becoming a bigger issue. I suppose variant coding and disabling car keys could be 'dangerous' (as not sure disabling a car key in the EIS is a one way trip?) and Developer mode is whole different league - judging from my experience with my local MB dealership, a league that is probably far above even most MB trained technicians there!

My approach to 'playing off piste' is to a) do as much research as possible on the internet, b) ask this forum for help/opinion, c) try out the steps in the simulator, and d) take a printout of the variant coding from the actual car as a reference PRIOR to making any changes on the car. Where possible try to find a 'donor' car to get the variant coding as a reference for comparison. (Using this approach I have managed to find some very deep and sometimes scary settings that I would not have ordinarily attempted to modify on my own!).

Once ready to make the changes, it is important to make ONLY ONE variant coding change at a time to investigate whether the effect of the single modification is taking you towards the change you desire or away from it. If it breaks something, time to revert the last setting changed, and if all else fails, the settings can usually be reverted back to the settings in the reference printout.

Using the above approach I have had a lot fun not only researching but also managing to reconfigure the variant coding on my NTG 2.5 to enable Linguatronics - the settings for enabling/disabling Linguatronics is not at all obvious but that is the fun and satisfaction in successfully completing such a task (even if it is 4AM in the morning when one finally achieves it!). "

Do you completely agree this point of view?