Anyone believe the StarForce hype?

I'm now removing Starforce from my new gaming PC on the suspicion that it is ruining/ruined 2 DVD drives. I became suspicious when the second one started to play up yesterday and today. I was getting random system freezing and even re-boots and both drives have made various un-nerving grinding and generally weird noises - just like when you put in a wrong format disk or something.


On my system I have (as per Device Manager):

StarForce Protection Environment Driver (version 1.x.a)
StarForce Protection Environment Driver v6
StarForce Protection Helper Driver
StarForce Protection Helper Driver (version 2.x)
StarForce Protection Helper Driver v2
StarForce Protection Synchronization Driver v1


One concern I have here is, why are so many driver versions all installed at the same time? Sureley this is not good - especially if they might all be active and confusing a DVD drive.

To check what you have installed - right-click 'My Computer' - select 'Properties' - click 'Hardware' tab - click 'Device Manager' - click 'View' and click 'Show hidden devices' - look in your 'Non-Plug and Play Drivers' list.

I've begun reading that StarForce is one thing that is causing various problems for Vista users - baring in mind, old games install old versions of it.

I've removed the drivers and re-booted. Both DVD drives appear to be behaving normally.

I'm on the TrashForce boycot wave ...
I don't buy any game and if I miss an interesting game due to that I mail the support of the publisher normally, telling them that I would be happy if they contacted me after they remove the illegal drivers from SF (since the offered a torrent on the official SF boards to that turn based Master of Orion type game that did not want to use a copy protection, just to show that no copy protection isn't acceptable, they are on my black list and I still hope they get death sued for it some day)

I'm staying away from these digital restriction schemes as muc h as possible. I like to stay in control of my own computer.

I had to use Google to find out how to get rid of starforce after it got 'accidentally' installed from an OEM version of Trackmania that came with my graphics card.

I believe in using an Xbox 360 for gaming instead of a PC that never meets the system requirements, OS X for working and otherwise avoiding DRM-infested crap wherever possible.

Same for me except it was Trackmania 'Demo'
After installing the demo I got a message saying "Starforce protection installed. You need to reboot"

That scared me a bit since I initially thought it was a virus. There was NO warning or mention during the game installation.

I noticed later I could not copy files to blank CDR's. Windows would complain that no recordable media was found.
I dug around the internet and found a Starforce removal tool which seemed to have fixed things

Needless to say Trackmania was promply removed and I emailed the authors with a rather blunt email asking them why they did not give any warning that SF was about to be installed (at Ring '0' too!)

They gave the typical tripe response like, "don't worry, the drivers are only used when the game loads"

Shame really because TM was a fun game to play.

Starforce Removal

Or their admin post a torrent link to a commercial game on their support forums! :P

Numptys

Dabz

Companies that use StarForce are idiots that think they can trick everyone else into being idiots and believing bullcrap like that... I boycotted Codemasters but their latest games appear to be using SecuROM now so...

I am lucky in that I have never had a problem caused by StarForce, but then I have only tried the versions that come with TrackMania and any other game that uses it can get stuffed.

I've lost three drives within a year, and I have no proof as to weather it was starforce that did it or not, but I have not had another drive go on me since I avoided Shitarforce.

I have a destroyed Plextor DVD burner thanks to Starforce. Almost put me off buying games entirely.

Well, the thing is my two DVD drives are back to normal. I installed the second one due to the first one having problems - the second one had the same problems. All I have done is remove StarForce and I had forgotten about the problem until I saw "FlameDuck's" post - which made me remember my drives are working normally.

StarForce has to be the culprit.

I had a computer die completely as I was removing the StarForce drivers, using their own removal tool. It was probably just an unlucky coincidence, but I'm not prepared to take the risk again.