Quote:
Originally posted by shamrock_uk:
Is Starforce particularly nasty?
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Well, firstly, it has the exact same design as a trojan. And that includes read/write access as well as netbios priority. It operates at ring0, and allows any upper ring to access it, making it a pretty big security flaw. But by far the biggest gripe with it is that Starforce is a processor hog, unshutdownable, interferes with drives and is totally incompatible with SCSI, external drives and any kind of emulation software. Many hardware failures have been linked to it, even my own problem which I had when my Plextor decided not to burn anything over 600MB. After removing it(even it's developers agree it's bad, being the only copy-protection to offer a clean-up program on their site) it suddenly felt better.
So what to do when you get a Starforce protected game: check if there is a NoCD to be found anywhere. If yes, install the game, put the NoCD in, and then get rid of Starforce. If not, do not install the game.
I hope that X3 will get the same update X2 got, when the devs released an official NoCD patch specifically to go around Starforce. I'll keep my fingers crossed.