Hi,
I'd bought one of the cheap ebay VAG COM cables, but in my haste I didn't read the operating system information in sufficient detail, to find that all the cheap ones only work on Windows XP. Yes, a now extinct operating system.
To cut a long story short, the issue is purely the USB driver. My computer is running windows 8.1 and couldn't find the USB acting as a com port. If you buy one of these cables, don't install their USB driver as it's for XP, rather download the latest CH341SER driver (CH341SER.EXE) which works on all operating systems. If you had already tried to install with the provided driver, you must run the uninstall first. It doesn't just do an update, you'll get a USB driver install fail response. After downloading and before installing, do the install in "Run as Administrator" mode. Likewise, I also found the VAG COM and VCDS was more stable when ran as adminstrator.
Hope this helps someone, I was in the process of creating a "virtual machine" on my system with XP, but that also had a few driver issues.
Now it works on all windows operating systems. It still has obvious limitations being the cheap cable and not a genuine Ross Tech one, but sufficient for my basic scan needs.
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