Kabootist has loaned me his before but this weekend I decided to just go buy my own. I'm trying to sell my Lexus and the CEL has been coming on, so I wanted to make sure what it was before I bought the $200 part and found out I got the wrong one. The Audi's been shooting some warning lites at my wife too, and this unit should be able to read those as well.
I bought my code reader at Harbor Freight - they had two different ones - for '02 and newer cars @ $69 and '96 and newer @ $79, and since the Lexus is a '98 that meant I had to get the spendy one - however, when she rang it up - she only charged me $40!
Score!
Turns out HF is feeling the crunch just like everyone else and has a ton of stuff marked down right now, so much so that they don't have time to change the labels ........so if you need some tools, this might be a really good time to go shopping.
Anywho, checked the Lexus and found out that the O2 sensor that's bad is not the one that's right in front out there in plain sight and easy to reach, of course not! It's the one in the back, underneath everything else that's not only imposssible to see but to even touch! <sighs>
This code reader also has the ability to read a "freeze frame" of the engine's parameters when it shoots the code, and can read vehicle info, chassis codes and body codes (A/C malfuntions for example) too, soo it's a pretty cool little diagnostic tool.
On another front, the liquid crystal radio display in the Lexus has turned black, the radio works fine, you just can't tell what station you're on or whatever. A little Googling led me to a Lexus owner's forum where I found a place where you can buy the display only for about $100, it's about 1/2 to 1 hour job to replace it and you're good to go! Beats paying Lexus $650 for a new radio!