If you have the laptop and cable. You can save a few bucks by going with Ion's $60 email package. This will give you unlimited updates w/o needing to send your pcm in everytime.
http://madz28.com/9495.php
Second option down.
This is what I had Ion do. After recently losing my flash during programming. I sent my pcm to Ion, had him socket the pcm, upload his tune onto two chips. One for the pcm, and another incase I ever lose the flash on the main chip again.
This way I just send the chip that the flash was lost on, into Ion for repair. While throwing my copy chip into the pcm and i'm back up and running. No downtime.
My cars wiring harness is faulty from the aldl connector - to - pcm so I'm now using a off-board programming wiring harness, so i
shouldn't lose any more.
Whenever I need something changed, I have a copy of TunerCats on this desktop. I'm still learning so if its too difficult for me, ill just let Ion know and he'll send the updated .bin file via email to me, and I'll upload it to the pcm via the bench-top wiring harness.