It would just say 'lost communication with vehicle'. With the Mini-VCI, I could never, ever get the active data list for the engine control module.
That really was helpful, and it has gotten me through all of the maintenance on my Gen 3 that I've needed to do over the last year. About a year ago, while I was feeling very indecisive about all the choices of cheap eBay dongles (mostly clones of the XHorse Mini-VCI) that might or might not work well with my car and Techstream, I was helped out by someone who had already been down that road, and picked out for me an old beater Windows 7 laptop and a Mini VCI and took care of all the installation for me.