Got my vag tacho 3.0 cable on Saturday afternoon; spent a ton of time on research and trying to get the cable (usb to iso/usb to serial) drivers to work with windows 7 (took almost all night) and today, I got them to work in Windows 8. I was able to successfully. If you want to program the immo, you need both VC-S and vagtacho. Vagtacho will get the skc for the key, vcds will allow you to match the key.
After spending all afternoon and into the evening working with Vagtacho; I was able to accomplish some things, that I needed to do.
1. got it to run on Windows 8:
Getting a driver; that works on your system, is trial and error, so try different versions until you find one that is compatible with your particular setup (e.g.: windows version, 32/64 bit etc.). The drivers on the disk that came with the cable; would work with XP but my laptop is windows 8. Sites, all over the web; say that it is more stable and XP for the 3.01 version of cable.
a: you need to download drivers from FTDI website (they are the makers of the chipset in the cable). I am running a 64 bit version of Windows 8; latest driver didn't work but I found a older version 2.08.28 to work (CDM 2.08.28 WHQL Certified): look at their website page at the bottom, under "no longer supported":
http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/D2XX.htm
b: When running vagtacho, it requires you to turn off windows defender and any virus software; otherwise, it will treat the app as a virus, remove it from your computer. So, when I turned it back on; WF removed it and this required me to re-install Vagtacho and the driver, every time I wanted to use it again.
2. pulled skc/pin out of both clusters: you need both to do the cluster swap and programming/matching in VC-S.
3. Unfortunately, I was not able to change odometer setting, button and feature, is grayed out. Sorry to metion that my Beetles 2002 was not included in the vagtacho 3.0 list. I may try to do some more research on this but I'm assuming, not all features work all every vag dash out there.
4. Another option; seems to be Super VAG K+CAN hand held scan tool or the VAGDASH cable/software combo, looks like SuperVAG is a nice little tool though (reads pin, claims to reset odometer, airbags, read codes, program new keys, etc.).
Reference:
vagtacho 3.0 USB cable list:
(This means: VW Passat B6, Bora/Jetta, Polo to 2004 year, Golf 4, Sharan to 2003 year,Skoda Octavia/Fabia to 2004 year , some Seat dashes up to 2004 year ect...)
VAG Kombiinstrument / Immo box eeprom programmer... via OBD connector!
Latest update: VW Polo ,Seat Ibiza Cordoba 2001 - 2005, Fabia 2004 ect.