Starforce killed my DvD burner/device

[iRocco]

Thanks alot ED for ****ing up my dvd device. INstalled the game, activated, rebooted and now the dvd device doesnt work anymore, cant read cd/dvds anymore.

 

Who to ask for a compensation?

[159th_Viper]

Thanks alot ED for ****ing up my dvd device. INstalled the game, activated, rebooted and now the dvd device doesnt work anymore, cant read cd/dvds anymore.

 

Who to ask for a compensation?

 

What Game......?

 

If you are referring to Black Shark, then I'm afraid you're P1$$ing against the Wind dear 'Ol Chap! Black Shark does not install any drivers on your system, effectively negating your allegation.

 

And Yeah - you might want to work on that attitude lest you get rumbled ;)

[EtherealN]

Correlation does not equal causation. There is also differences between Starforce and Starforce. DCS:BS (if that is the game you installed and I assume it is since you are posting in the DCS section) uses StarForce ProActive, which does not install any drivers or rootkits. There is to my knowledge no way for it to do anything at all to your DVD drive.

[GGTharos]

We had another person who reported similar before - turned out he had a malfunctioning motherboard, IIRC.

 

The only version of DCS:BS which checks DVD and installs drivers to do so is the Russian DVD version, which you shouldn't really be able to get easily.

 

If you got the English download, no such drivers are present; it doesn't even touch your DVD.

 

Thanks alot ED for ****ing up my dvd device. INstalled the game, activated, rebooted and now the dvd device doesnt work anymore, cant read cd/dvds anymore.

 

Who to ask for a compensation?

[GGTharos]

after i used up my last activation i can do 2 things, pay another 50 euro's for something i already should have, risking having to pay another 50 euro's to download the game again when the other keys expire, or just download it for free (i have seen it for free already, even before i bought it!), well what would u do?

 

... I would ask ED for another key. They've had no qualms about handing them out when required.

[EtherealN]

Hyperfighter, the reason we are saying that StarForce ProActive should not be able to break your hardware is that it doesn't install any drivers. Previous StarForce solutions did. There is a considerable difference between "reusing code" and whether there are drivers or rootkits present.

 

If you are paranoid about it you could use Process Explorer to view exactly what gets loaded with DCS and then see what it is.

 

"Looking at the hardware" is a very different thing. CPU-Z "looks at the hardware" and is able to get CPUID and tonnes of other stuff without such things, the same for most any kind of utility or game out there. How do you think any game knows how to run on your machine if it doesn't know what hardware you have? There is only so far that you can go through letting the OS handle everything.

 

Ever seen those functions in the graphics settings of most games where you can have it propose a setting for your computer? That's because they look at the hardware and have templates for how it should interpret them. Doesn't mean they are malicious or are installing drivers, they just phone the computer up and say "Yo dude, what are you made of?"

 

So as long as ED and StarForce have been upfront with how this thing works, something that seems to be confirmed by people who have looked at Process Explorer.

 

Hardware slowdowns can be caused by a multitude of things AND can be pure impression, it is often hard to say. My laptop was giving me strange issues with stuttering and the only change I could attribute it to at first was a new bootloader (dualbooting Vista and Linux on it), because it had started just as I got that installed and Vista restores didn't change anything.

 

...then I started up everest and noticed that my processor's idle temperature was 90 degrees and that any kind of "proper" workload would cause it to quickly hit 100 and start cycle-hopping to cool itself down, dramatically lowering performance and causing the stuttering. In the end it turned out that just by coincidence the dust situation in the internal airflow plumbing had gotten critical at the same time I swapped bootloader leading to an obvious correlation that was not the causation.

 

Now, I'm not saying with 100% certainty that it's impossible for StarFarce to cause issues, it's just that I don't know of any way for it to do so in this incarnation. I have a very very passionate dislike for StarFarce in particular and activation-based systems in general (I can rant about "rentals" and how only the legit customers get hit and so on for ages if prompted. :P ) but that doesn't mean it has magical hardware destruction properties. In fact, from what I've been able to see of it, it really doesn't have any capability beyond what you could call query priviliges - that is, just like any other program it can ask the computer what it is, and then make a decision on whether it'll let you start DCS.exe or not.

[iRocco]

We had another person who reported similar before - turned out he had a malfunctioning motherboard, IIRC.

 

The only version of DCS:BS which checks DVD and installs drivers to do so is the Russian DVD version, which you shouldn't really be able to get easily.

 

If you got the English download, no such drivers are present; it doesn't even touch your DVD.

 

sorry i didnt mention it, i got the russian version bought in moscow, but couldnt play the game until now, as i said before, i installed it and saw that starforce message, rebooted and the dvd drive got owned. the issue has to be the starforce stuff, the drive is 5 months old.

[GGTharos]

Ok - I see you are being taken care of on the German forum, so let them take the lead with you.

 

sorry i didnt mention it, i got the russian version bought in moscow, but couldnt play the game until now, as i said before, i installed it and saw that starforce message, rebooted and the dvd drive got owned. the issue has to be the starforce stuff, the drive is 5 months old.

[Namenlos Ein]

sorry i didnt mention it, i got the russian version bought in moscow, but couldnt play the game until now, as i said before, i installed it and saw that starforce message, rebooted and the dvd drive got owned. the issue has to be the starforce stuff, the drive is 5 months old.

 

http://forums.eagle.ru/forumdisplay.php?f=84 — Bugs and Problems in Russian forum. No single post about problems with DVD-ROM or DVD writer device.

 

But in Internet you can find a lot stories about such troubles.

 

Maybe this can help: http://www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-support/removable-media-drives/79149-starforce-destroyed-my-dvd-rom-what-can-i-do.html

[GGTharos]

Maybe because that cost is stupidly low for proving such a challenge. It's more affordable to just buy a new bloody computer. I don't want to see anyone else deriding people about this StarForce thing, regardless of which camp they're in.

 

Period.

[diveplane]

whens the last time checked for dust inside the optical dvd cd drive?

 

maybe simple as that, you can buy dvd cd rom lens cleaners , its a cd with small brushes

on the disc. also a can of air wont do it any harm to blast dust build up out it.

 

i dont believe for one min starforce kills hardware that rediculis comments really.

[hyperfighter]

why was my post on this forum removed?

i was polight and a good post, i merely showed starforce has issues and i proved it.

diveplane u might think its ridiculous starforce kills hardware, but it has happened in the past and they admitted it too....

in an answer to the post i had here (it has been removed because ???)

i was assured the protection doesnt use rootkits anymore...

maybe they can explain why the new avira antivirus gives this message:

 

got TR/Rootkit.Gen - Trojan warning on following files:

Ka50.dll

View.dll

 

or are u gonna remove my post again?

Edited March 20, 2009 by hyperfighter

[Distiler]

oh man you're annoying as hell XD stop talking trash please XD

 

PD: i deserve a warning but I had to say it!!!

[hyperfighter]

well i will, since it seems if one has comments on the protection system or point out problems, u descend in rep or posts will be removed anyway (censorship ftw!).

if i ask why avira detects rootkits i get no answer, but i get called names as annoying etc.

any further discussion seems pointless.

ill point out sore points in other forums and only talk about the good things of DCS (yes ITS THE BEST SIM EVER, and i do think its great) in here from now on, and see if i can help out others which i did in several other posts.

[GGTharos]

Because Avira likes to detect false positives. Not everything is a conspiracy you know :P

 

As I recall your problems were resolved with a hardware replacement.

[hyperfighter]

>Guilty< ;P