TUNING SOFTWARE AND 1.8T TUNING DISCUSSION

Before you even attempt to make changes to your ecu youll need to understand how those changes will affect how the car is running. In order to do this youll need to be able to log your car. a few programs can be use starting with the basic vag-com / vcds. VAG-COM / VCDS can only log a 3 blocks at at  time and the data transfer rate is kinda slow. Although its a bit slow and you can only read 3 data block at a time its still logging in real time.
measuring blocks of interest:

20: timing correction  
31: actual afr vs request (values are in lambda for afr : 14.7* lambda value = current afr)
32: long term fuel trims (these values should be very close to 0% and more then 5% you may need to check for vacuum leaks or poor fueling)
33: lambda control
115: actual boost vs request absolute (to find actual boost in psi convert millibar to bar *14 = absolute psi - 14 = actual boost in RELATIVE  psi

For pulling complete high speed logs youll need to use me7 logger. Me7 logger started life as a cmd based program that required use of cmd line and was not user friendly. over the last few years a few enthusiasts  have made a gui to simplify the usage of me7 logger.
below is the thread link from nefmto tuning forum from the original me7 logger post:
http://nefariousmotorsports.com/forum/index.php/topic,837.0title,.html

this is the link for the gui:
http://nefariousmotorsports.com/forum/index.php?topic=4830.0

editing software: there is 2 main software tuning suites besides commercial software and those are WinOLS and Tunerpro. Both of these software suites are not vag specific and require a bit of leg work to get all that you need. WinOLS is a very powerful software suite that can can open and make sense of may files that Tunerpro can not. OLS, KP, DAM, AL2 are all file extensions associated with WinOLS. OLS extension is a project file that contains your tune file and the map pack for it. KP is a map pack only file that was generated from winOLS. DAM and AL2 are normally factory definition files from the original calibrators that have been leaked to the public or released over time .Tuner pro only has a few file extensions that youll need to keep note of and thats xdf and adx. xdf is a map pack just like kp extension is for winOLS. adx is not going be used so we woll not discuss that.