To all those people....

Who have posted here about having their computers damaged by STARFORCE.

I shall be sending each of you a PM within the next 28 days.

Spider252 what about users who are not touched by starforce yet? Why don't you share information with everyone, we might need it sooner or later !

Doggie... Information WILL be shared at a later date/time.

At the moment it just the people who have damaged systems I will be contacting.

for the record - I have a liteon DVD-/+RW and CDRW and have daemontools loaded permanently and I have not had any issues whatsoever with Starforce.

for the record...Plextor-716SA,Plextor Premium, Teac DVD-ROM. After installing SHIII I could no longer read/write to data disks I created, nor could I watch a commercial DVD movie w/o total system lock-up. Access to my data disks is important as they contain historical legal information required in my profession. After uninstalling SHIII (and running SF removal), Nero, and disk drives and re-booting letting WinXP detect the drives, install Nero -all is good. Ergo-SF is the culprit.

*SYSTEM SPECS IN SIG*

Before I tell u what happened to me, I want to make it clear that I am not totally sure StarForce did this, however the problems I have encountered, appeared after Installing and Uninstalling SHIII and StarForce.

I bought the game a few weeks ago, and it installed just fine. The StarForce protection check was very fast (5 secs tops). The game, itself is VERY nice, and a good game.

However...

About a week and a half after installing SHIII/SF I noticed minor problems with my computer, some of these being, programs not responding, program errors, dramatically lowered system performance, and a slow down in IL-2 FB+AEP+PF. However, my CD-RW Drive was still working.

As the days went by, these errors got worse and worse, happening more often. I then decided to uninstall SHIII, and I downloaded the StarForce Remover tool, and removed starforce. Once I uninstalled these 2 things, IL-2 FB+AEP+PF was back to normal, program errors seemed to have gone away. However, my overall system performance was still really slow, as compared to what it was like before StarForce, and some programs still didn’t respond sometimes.

About 3 Days Later..

While surfing the internet, browsing, etc. All the sudden my computer shuts off! I turn it back on....the HP Blue screen loads up, then......BLACK SCREEN!, no text, no Windows XP start up, nothing. Well, Sh!t I thought to myself. The only thing I can do is, use the HP System Recovery....which in turn will DELETE all of my files/documents. I do it, and it works. The system is back to factory status. Feeling good that I don't have anymore problems, I precede the tedious task of installing programs, and trying to recover documents.
After the whole day of reinstalling, I decide to get some sleep.....I shut down the computer...

I turn it on the next morning. HP Blue screen loads.....!!What’s this!? It's a black screen, displaying current system parts/specs, and at the bottom...

SAMSUNG(hard drive ######)
Hard disk failure is imminent.
Please back up your hard disk and replace!

F1-Setup F2-contiune

I press F1, it goes to the BIOS...ok esc out, and hit F2 and it loads windows. SO NOW, every time I start my computer I have to hit F2, and I don't even know that the hell is wrong with the hard drive. I ran Disk checks, HD Surface checks, defrag, etc, and it says it’s ok.

Like I said, I didn't download anything prior to this that had a virus as I have anti virus and scan all of my downloads. The only culprit I can think of is SHIII/SF, but as I said im not totally sure.

But...I do know that it did slow down my system, and cause errors, so I am not EVER AGIAN installing SHIII, or ANY StarForce product/game. As far as am conserned, SF can shove there protection software up there arses.

Yours truly,
Cylix

Sounds like coincidence, your HD is on the way out (it seems), SF doesn't do anything other than run in the background -yes it can knock out combo drives,clone software etc. But it doesn't destroy HDs!

The PC that my wife has, went through the exact same symptoms about 4 months back, slowing down,loading taking ages etc,etc ran the diagnostic for the HD (Seagate) found 3 dead sectors -no problem can continue with that if it's not drastic. So she did for another few days.. then NTFS problems appeared and programs wouldn't load and files were getting corrupted.

Well we're PC savvy folks, Virus scan up to date, daily scan at 7pm, spam remover/blocker,hardware firewall and software firewall you name it it's followed and got.

Then next day it just hung, black screen no bootup. I pulled the HD -replaced it with a new Western Digital and guess what? It's all perfect and has been ever since!
The Seagate was dying slowly.
I checked it out and found that aside from all the protection she had the HD had some backdoor trojan mallware (not serious) which was killing the progs and corrupting the files. Virus scanner never found it and quite a few other free progs didn't either but an online Vscanner DID! The HD failing at the same time was coincidence.
It went in the bin.

So you see, unless you get your HD diagnosed with an online/downloadable util from Samsung, Then we've all been in those same shoes whereby we blame the first thing that we've installed that caused X&Y problems *before* we installed it

OK, that's it with this subject.

See my StarForce and You thread, featured topic.