What if your clone won't accept a firmware flash? What if the ISP header is dead?

After following this guide, your VCDS HEX V2 clone should exhibit these "better" characteristics:

Clone firmware writes logs to the 24C64 EEPROM constantly. Cheap EEPROMs die after 100,000 writes. You can't change the hardware, but you can modify the to disable excessive logging.

: Creating a Windows Firewall rule to block all incoming/outgoing traffic for the VCDS executable.