This is one of those "leaving your car battery on concrete will discharge it" myths that needs to die.

I was an IT guy in a past life and I don't know what kind of IT work you do but I've made a LOT of money fixing Windows systems so I will encourage people to keep using it :D

Windows 10, for the average user is the best OS in my opinion. Ease of usability, compatibility, software library etc, etc. By far the best.

MacOS? Pff it's basically linux with built in obsolescence.

Linux? Very stable OS that is great for a "small" group of people that enjoy spending time trying to do things themselves.

What OS do you use Andrew?

With regards to Win7 vs Win10. If you're talking about using the OS for an ISTA/INPA rig, then Win10 all day long. Even for everyday tasks there's no reason to use Win7. There's nothing about it that works better than Win10

I setup a lab win identical IBM thinkpads from the ISTA era to see for myself what works best and after all is said and done there's no reason to use XP, ME, Vista or Windows7. All the other OSs don't have support for drivers, or security and they don't even have an updated browser you can use.

I don't know why everyone thinks that you have to use an older laptop. It wil run perfectly fine with a brand new whateveriscurrent model.

As I see it, the reason only reason to use an old laptop was if you have a piece of hardware more than capable of running the software why not use it instead of spending more money. You can turn off the windows Aero bullshit if you want it to run faster.

Use whatever laptop you have with Win10, follow a pretty straight forward install procedure to install the software and get a cable from Amazon/eBay.

No emulators
No compatibility mode

I have a few things that work better that comes to mind: the start menu, the search field, windows explorer behavior, Bing nags on Win10. And most importantly, forced updates, and phoning home with your data on Win10. Those things have kept me from using it on our machines. But due to newer hardware features not supported by Win10 I am likely to HAVE to switch soon as I piece together my new main rig. Anyone want to sell me a graphics card??? :D

But yes, the current flavors of BMW software run fine on Win10. Driver support for the cables is great and haven't had an issue.

100% agree. Thank you.
:dh:

I use BMW Scanner 1.4, INPA, ISTA and DIS on my Microsoft Surface Pro notebook running Windows 11 - no issues. It's better to use the automatic installers instead of a manual install which can be a nightmare, even for an IT pro. I bought the apps from https://www.bcables.com/, who have automatic one-click installers that worked very well for my setup. I've used their auto installer on my old notebook running win7, and didn't have issues either.

@X5only, does the bcables package link DIS to the WDS and repair info?

I've never met anyone that's admitted to using Bing :D