help needed on a daewoo with a baby XE

this is beyond my normal range, so i thought i'd ask you lot..

our company secretary has a 53 reg daewoo tacuma thing.

it has what appears to be an x16xel in it. it definitely has a throttle cable...

it has started running rough & she asked me to have a quick look, so i did, then i turned my attentions to her car...

i have not got access to any obd type reader (my laptop went bang & i haven't got it fixed yet)
so i was doing simple basic checks. all the usual stuff is ok, as in head gasket, running temp.. it was a little low on oil, but nothing else of note.
all 4 plugs are getting a decent spark

the injectors are quite noisy, but they seem to be working ok.

i tried unplugging the lambda sensor, as it is really easy to get at, thinking it would go on to limp home mode, or similar, and it did nothing to change how the engine was running....

should i be looking at cam sensors, CTS etc, or is the lambda the likely culprit..

all help will be appreciated, and unfortunately there are no pics of the secretary...

cheers

mike

How old are the plugs? Then a good throttle body clean out wont help but if you get a scaner and can see the data that will most likely tell you the issue

Hard to tell really. Its likely something simple but its the diagnostics thats tricky. Could be crank or cam (not both obviously) loosing sync pulse makes the timing go off. Could be lambda as you say. We could randomly guess all day and someone is bound to be right... but that doesn't help you impress the secretary. Try getting your laptop working. Nothing drops a womans pants quicker than a guy who can swiftly and confidently navigate OBD protocol on a laptop. If anything, it makes it look like you know what your doing.
If you want to impress her further, wear a nice shirt, style your hair in a quirky fashion and talk about things in which you share a common interest. Try and stay off polarised topics like politics. Raid her glove box and see what music she likes. This is a good conversation starter and an insight to her music taste/mental health.

Let me know how you get on or if you find out what was up with the car.

ML

Is it showing an engine management light? if not then its likely a code reader wont show much up anyway.

Does it run rough all the time or just when cold or warmed up etc?

it seems to run rough pretty much all of the time

down on power, or just sounding like a bag of spanners?

bit of both.. this thing really is a shed of a car... the daewoo forum reckons it might be worth cleaning the Egr valve before looking at other problems, so i reckon i'll try that 1st..

no management light is coming on though

Thats kind of where I was going, EGR valve issues are fairly common causes for poor running but no EML/MIL

i'll give the EGR a try..