[HangFire]

Ok, so today I was curious so I started to read about a type of CD copy protection, called StarForce. I had heard it has a lot of problems, but after doing some digging apparently its a lot worse than I thought at first.


Basically, Starforce is a set of drivers that installs itself silently onto your PC with a game, without your knowledge or confirmation. There is no mention of this in EULAs.

When I found out, I immediately checked to see if I had it on my PC. I went to Windows device manager, checked on "show hidden devices", and there was 4 different StarForce drivers on my PC. My immediate reaction of was to get rid of them, but I figured I'd look into it more.


After checking, apparently they're a real bitch to remove. Uninstalling the game will not remove them, as I do not have any StarForce games installed right now. Also, as I've read, for some people manually getting rid of the drivers their PC to the point that it needed a full re-install of everything to work again.



Its been reported that it also gobbles up CPU cycles, slows CD drive read times, creates CD-R read errors, and is responsible for many device conflicts that people have had. For some it screwed their CD-rom up to the point where it wouldn't work period.

Also, StarForce isn't the only one to do crap like this, theres a number of other copy protection things that load crap on, but none are as malicious as StarForce.


From now on one of my requirement of wether or not I pay for a game will be what sort of copy protection it has.



I found this; http://www.larian.com/riftrunner/support/SFclean.zip . Its supposed to safely remove Starforce if its causing problems with people's hardware, or if they just don't want that crap sitting on their drive.


Maybe I'm just over-reacting, but oh well.

Edit: Removed some profanity and fixed grammer.

Also, I tested it on my PC. It asked for a reboot, I did it, and it gave me no problems and removed Starforce.

One note is that removing it will make any Starforce games not run unless you have installed a no-cd crack for it. No, I do not support piracy, and circumventing CD checks is not illegal.

StarForce probably doesn't reduce your PC to a smouldering pile of ash like I make it sound to, for the mostpart its probably harmless and only a minority experience problems, but I'm just one of those people who prefers a PC thats as 'clean' as possible.