I have been reading alot of the post about tuners/programmers. People asking what is the best or the worst, what should i get? So I would like to share my experience.
I decided to get a sct live wire for my 2004 f350 cc long bed 6.0 with just a cold intake on it. The misses and I recently purchased a 39 footer 5th wheel toy hauler. It is a heavy son of a biscuit. I knew I was gonna need a lil umph for it, living in the valley of sin city. Some of the reasons for going with sct was the fact it can tune the tranny and sct seem to have less complaints about them.
When I got mine in the mail, I was excited to install it. The first thing I noticed was the thing was huge. How in the hell was I gonna see around it with the windshield mount? Where was the directions? It was on a cd. Then I noticed a sticker on the tuner saying to update the firmware before installing. So I installed the software on the computer and tried to update the firmware. It didnt work! So being a typical man , the wife finally made me print the directions. After print them out I tried again to update firmware. Nothing! Ok screw it and off I went to install it.
Simple enough i plugged it into the obd port and it lite up. So i followed the on screen directions and it was easy. Word of warning if you are uploading in the summer time ROLL DOWN ALL WINDOWS cause you will sitting there for awhile(guess what my dumb *** did?)It takes awhile to d-load and upload so bring a few beers out with ya.
Ten minutes later I was done. Off I went. Oh man what a difference. I was doing about 20 mph and i stomped on it and it smoked the tires! The it occurred to me the tuner did NOT ask what tune I wanted installed. When you follow the directions it tells you to skip user adjustments. I didnt know which tune i had installed and the way the truck was running I swore it was superduperturboboostwithnos setting.
After goofing off for a awhile and the wife threatening missing persons report i finally went home. Locked truck up and went in thinking about nothing else. Took trash out 10 minutes later and saw the blue glow coming from the cab. Damn display was still on. I figured it was like my trailer controller it would power down after no use. NOPE! I could not find the off button and I could not find in the directions how to power it down. So I tried calling the speed shop i got it from. They didnt have a clue but he did have sct #. Turns out the esc. button is the off button. Mystery solved.
I had found a business card in the box the tuner came with and logged unto the site and started to read FAQ's. Thats when I discovered SCT says if upload your stock tunes 5 times the box locks and you have to send it back to them along with $65 to unlock it. Not sure it thats a good thing or not but I dont plan on goin back to stock tune until smog test time.

I hope i didnt bore anyone. I just wanted to give some clue what to expect from this tuner. I love it. I cant imagine anything better then this. It also told me I have a carrier bearing going bad too. When I smashed the pedal to the floor, I just heard a thunk, knew right away what that was from. I hope i helped some choose sct.

 

If you don't have head studs on that truck, you are playing with fire if you don't know what tune you have on there.

 

I had no idea about that, kinda sux

 

As I understand it, the unlock counter doesn't go down unless you change vehicles. If you flash to stock and then back to a tune on the same vehicle, it doesn't affect the unlock counter. Below is from the manual.

"X3 Power Flash VIN locks to a single vehicle. You cannot use the device to tune a new or different vehicle, until you have returned the original vehicle back to stock, which will unlock the device. You can only change vehicles 5 times before the unit is permanently locked."

 

Gotchya, makes sense now and is not limiting like I thought.

 

Good info to know!

 

You can upload your stock tune all you want, for 1 vehicle. The 5 unlocks are for if you are tuning more than one vehicle.