Hello dear people on the internet, I bought a cheap FT232RL cable from China with a fake chip almost 3 years ago. It was my go-to cable for everything, but it met it's fate when I slammed the door on it, by accident.
So I got another one, which wasn't used that many times since I got a hex can v2 cable too. Anyways I recommended the cable to my buddy since, like me, he has a 1.8T in his car, and this cable is good value for money, so I thought.
He couldn't get it to work, so I told him to drop by with his cable and laptop and I'd help get it to work. I whipped out my own cable so I could see which driver I ran, and shit, that's when the funny thing happened, mine didn't work either.
The Windows update updated the driver to 2.12.36.4, and we had all kinds of errors popping up in VCDS, and it couldn't communicate with any modules. I tried his cable with my laptop and vice versa, no luck.
Neither Nefmoto ecu flasher nor kw1281test worked. I tried the drivers 2.10.0.0, 2.8.28.0, and 2.02.04, and you guessed it, no luck. Tried it on my pc, no change.
It has the number 403 showing up for VID and 6001 for PID, not all 0s like it would be if the FTDI driver bricked it, like in 2014 or 2016.

My question is how can I continue to waste more time trying to fix this shit? I'm out of ideas. Ideally, I would get a more reliable cable, but I could just buy a genuine chip and solder that onto the PCB if that's the problem.