Star force protection afects CD\DVD drivers?

[The Godfather]

Hey I was just wandering...Do this protection efects in any way my optical drivers?

[Sidney]

No it doesn't.
The only people who have any problems at all are those who attempt to use the various utilities available in an attempt to play with a non-original cd/dvd.

[RincewindTheWiz]

Actually there are lots of reports of interference with the normal working of cd/dvd devices. This is because some Starforce versions introduce errors in the datastream, and the problem is that Windows will start throttling the speed of the drive after a certain, low number of errors. This gave some people really slow dvd-writers (which was fixable by deleting and reinstalling the IDE drivers), but there have also been reports of drives that stopped working correctly for good. I don't know how many people had this problem, but it is rumored that this was a big part of the lawsuit against Ubisoft over SF3 started by a few pissed off buyers.

[Ronin2k3]

@Sidney,

Actually there are numerous problems with SF drivers EVEN if one uses the original discs...

As an example, Bet on Soldier gave me a CTD (Crash to Desktop) while playing and so did Battlefield 2. Errors usually gave me indication of problems with my Creative Audigy 2. So, replaced card, errors continued, removed card, used onboard audio, errors still continued. Later, after some forum visits and research into this, these errors appeared to be introduced by StarForce. They dissapeared after official patching of the .exe, with a newer version of starforce.

I just heard that some developers eventually released a patch without SF, just to make the gamers happy...

[RincewindTheWiz]

Over here, BF2 uses Safedisk 4. Does it use SF3 in your country, or do you mean that the SF drivers interfere with other protections ? I wouldn't be surprised if they did the latter, SF is a very aggressive copy protection...

[Sidney]

I have never had any problems using any Starforce 3 protected game.
Their drivers are perfectly safe to use, my experience bears that out.
I repeat, the only problems evident are those that people have when trying to play pirate copies.