Excellent point...we have such arrangements. On very rare occasions, for long-standing customers, we have retrieved/returned cars. It hurts a bit at $100/hr, but that sort of customer is well worth it. Some even stop by the shop for the ocasional good-natured session of giving us a hard time and receiving the same in kind. Our clients are a great bunch! Loyalty to your shop, and they to you, is priceless!

Oh, and as for the expense of towing to a shop, AAA can be your friend, in the US at least...10 bucks a month well-spent.

Experienced mechanic here (35 years)...a mobile mechanic who's well-outfitted can do well for a lot of jobs, but the whole "accurate diagnosis over the phone" thing is a bit disconcerting. We have 10's of thousands tied up in diagnostic gear (scan tools, oscilloscopes, dvoms, etc) and it can still be pretty tough on some jobs to get the car to glitch and figure it out. The folks who make you jump through the most hoops to help them ("can you come to me?", beat you to death haggling, etc) are generally the hardest to please, too. I wish these guys the best, but unless they're cherry picking, it could be a pretty tough gig. As for me, no thanks; I have plenty of work as an independent, and an excellent reputation that I don't want to jeopardize...I can serve the customer much better in a full-on shop.

will it still look someone puked their guts out after binging on a bucket of Jolly Ranchers?

uptodown.com hosts old versions of several android apps including es file explorer. The page loads in Spanish first, but changing to another language is pretty easily done. Versions of ES back to 1.6.1.6. That old enough for ya? And it's always passed every malware scan I've run. Of course, YMMV, caveat emptor, and all that...

except for a tenth of a percent, and they'll have the opposite response...their aggressor response increased beyond madness, and they've become...nah!

No, it's talking engine bay temp (that's where lots of PCMs are, you know) Underhood temps can get pretty high when you factor in summer heat in the desert, sitting at idle, with a 6-900 degree exhaust manifold sitting just inches away (yup, they get THAT hot!). And while cabin temps in a parked car with rolled-up windows in the summer in the desert don't quite hit 260, the do get really hot. A PCM mounted inside the vehicle has to be able to tolerate that, too. And yes, while the engine is running, it has to be able to deal with this. Although the cabin cools down quickly when you get in and open it up or turn on the a/c, the little nooks where they mount the PCM don't get the airflow and cool down a bit slower. Plus, the case is still really hot, so the internal temps of the PCM remain high for quite a bit. The environmental conditions these things are exposed to is insane.

I use OBD Guage on a lifedrive and on my laptop for basic stuff; it's easier than pulling out my "real" scanner with all the cables. It's a nice basic program that does data stream, snapshots, acceleration tests, reads and clears codes, and some other stuff. For hardware, I have a cheap ODB2 bluetooth dongle I got off ebay for 30 bucks that talks to the palm and lappy. It has about 25 feet of range, which is great when you have to work under the hood while watching the data. Best part--no cables to drag around. It won't talk to ABS or airbag computers, though. Still, for engine control diagnostics, it's about all most folks would ever need, as it does read all the popular protocols. The have a pocket pc version too. Since most folks here already have a pda or smartphone or laptop, the final cost is about 30 bucks and a 2-week wait as they ship from China. http://www.qcontinuum.org/obdgauge/

I gotta agree with the Captain on Clam here, but with a twist. I run a v-lited vista install without IE and a lot of the other junk. Other than a hardware firewall and the vista firewall, I don't have any protective stuff on my system and never get an infection. How do I know? From time to time, I boot from my Ubuntu thumb drive, update clam, and scan the system from outside windows (I don't trust a scan from within the os, but that's just me). So far, system's stayed clean, but I'm careful about where I browse (no porn or warez). I also turn off flash and/or javascript on many sites--I put buttons for that on my toolbar in Opera. It's funny, I've found about half or three quarters of the microsoft updates don'd apply to my system, since they're for systems I've removed and replaced with other options--Opera and FOSS stuff.

No, I bet his caffeine content is fine. The 68K transistors would refer to the 68000 procs from Motorola which were 16- or 32-bit depending on configuration. Some of them could be switched at boot time by holding one of the pins high or low (I forget which...where are those old data sheets I have on those?) Of course the 65xx series and the 6800 series were 8-bit, however, they didn't have close to 68K transistors. But GP is right on, 68K transistors for a 32-bit architecture.

A lot of folks calculate Jesus' birth at 2BC, which is even funnier and more ironic.

Unless, that is, the decade, century, and millenium actually started in 2001. In which case, this whole discussion is a year premature

Right there with ya, friend; I don't use XP myself. It's a pain to fresh install something that heavily patched. But if you're forced to install XP for granny or something, like your original post seems to indicate, slipstreaming is the way to go. Saves a LOT of headaches. Another approach that's worked for me in the past is to nlite the thing and rip out a lot of the heavily patched subsystems and replace those with OSS equivalents. Of course, don't do THAT for granny. That helps a lot if you want to get rid of about 25-50% of the updates. BTW, you can do that for Vista and 7 too w/vLite...built a version of Vista that boots in 30 seconds on my laptop and installs from a thumbdrive in 12 minutes. Still not as useful as most Linux distros outta the box, but it's a real improvement over stock MS installs. No cruft (well, for MS anyway) and rock stable. All drivers and updates there from the get-go and a wee bit over 700 megs for the install iso fully patched. If you gotta run windows, it's nice...

I feel your pain, but if you're not slipstreaming the stuff in before the install (writing a batch file for this is TRIVIAL), you're doing it the hard way. No reboots beyond the standard installation reboots, either. MUCH easier. Just sayin...but yeah, if that's what you use it for, that's a pretty good definition of obsolete.

Actually, the Skylark uses a steel shift cable, so yeah, it's mechanically linked. Just not by a more traditional hard linkage. Most cars have done that for a LONG time. The trans options on that vehicle are a 4T40E or a 4T60E, depending on the engine. Both are electronically controlled, but both use a steel shift cable to move the manual valve (that's what determines what range you're in). Look under the hood/bonnet, driver's side, on top of the trans, you'll see it. If it fails, you could be left in any range, not just neutral. But you're right, Ford does work essentially the same way. And all the car manufacturers do some really cool stuff as well as some really bone-headed stuff. Most of the rants I see here against US cars may reflect personal experience, but usually they relate to a fairly rare failure or a lemon. Truth is, they ALL work pretty well, and they ALL break. ALL manufacturers produce lemons from time to time. Personal experiences of a consumer aren't numerous enough to be statistically significant, although they are all most of us have. Most mechanics I know have biases, too. The failure rates aren't as different as most people believe. And the best car is one you like that works for you and you're confident in. Niggling cable point aside, parent is pretty much on the money.