Help with a few ? & identifiying the right F.E.A.R No CD crack for me.

[Magnus3204]

Hello all. New Here.

I have five questions here. I appreciate anyone that takes the time to read my post and help.

#1. I purchased F.E.A.R. retail at Game Stop and played it about half way through, but I later purchased The Suffering Ties That Bind. I installed it and then went to go back to play F.E.A.R., but my DVD drive went nuts! It was reving up to speeds that it should never go up to by the sound of it and shuttering. When I stopped it and took the disk out it had a bunch of faint scratches and some tiny cracks along the inner and outer edges.

Of course now I can't play F.E.A.R. because my disk 5 or my "play" disk is fubar. The game is the version that came as 5 CD disks not one DVD.

I learned about a set of copy protection derivers called Starforce that come with The suffering TTB. I can only immagine that this is why my DVD drive went crazy. I unistalled the drivers and then The suffering TTB would not play as I suspected.

This all happened some time ago and I really don't care about the suffering. I am more interested in being able to finally play my F.E.A.R. the rest of the way through.

I found the page on GCW that has a bunch of No CD cracks. I figure I could use a crack like that to finish playing the game.

The problem is there are a lot of them and I am not sure what one to use.

The readme in my c/program files/F.E.A.R. says the following:
F.E.A.R. - First Encounter Assault and Reconnaissance
English (North America) version 1.0
Readme File

#2. So I see that I am updated to v1.0 and I can see on The F.E.A.R No CD cracks page that go as far as up to 1.8 or so. There are cracks for v1.0. Should I just go for one of those and if so what one do you folks recommend? Or should I actually try to update to 1.8 first then get a crack for 1.8?

#3. Will F.E.A.R work on Vista? I ask because I was on another system with XP SP2 when I first installed it.

#4. Like I said I first installed F.E.A.R. on my old system:

Microsoft Windows XP Home SP2
MidATX Case
Bestec 300 12E REV-D 300watt. Power Supply
K7MNF-64 PCB 1.x 400MHz FSB USB2.0 8XAGP
Nforce2Chipset 400MHz FSB
AMD Sempron 3000+ ~2000MHz 512L2cache 333MHz
Samsung 1GB DDR PC3200 400MHz RAM (2 x 512MB)
Maxtor 80Gig 7200rpm HDD (16MB cache)

(Origonal on board - NVidia Ti 4600 on board chipset 128MB allocated RAM)
(Old video card - Chaintech NVidia FX 5700 LE 256MB DDR 8X AGP)
New video card - EVGA NVidia GeForce 7600 GS 256MB DDR2 8X AGP

NForce2 Audio Chipset (Useing Sony HiFi Sterio Headphones With Mic)
DVDR-RW Double Layer 8.5Gig
DVD-ROM
8 in1 Digital Media Manager
___________________________________
Then I bought this new system and I transfered all of my programs and files and such via the Vista easy transfer tool. Includeing F.E.A.R.:
___________________________________

Manufacturer Gateway
Model W5243 ~e machines

(BIOS: ) Phoenix - Award Workstation BIOS v6.00PG
Windows Vista (TM) Home Premium Operating
System (6.0, Build 6001) Service Pack 1
System type 32 - bit operating system

300 watt power supply
(I Have a new 400 watt PS I could install if needed, but i figure a 500 or 600 watt would be a better fit for my system as i add hardware.)

Motherboard
ECS MCP61SM-GM mATX motherboard
2000 MHz system bus

Processor
AMD Athlon™ 64 3800+, 64-bit processor with AMD 64 technology and HyperTransport with 512 L2 ~2400 MHz
Number of processor cores 1 - 64 bit capable

Memory
1024 MB Samsung DDR2-667 MHz (PC2-5300) Dual Channel memory (two 512 MB unbuffered modules)
(Actually reads as 896 MB due to 128 MB being allocated to video RAM)
(I am starting to realise 1 GB (512+512) of ram is not really enough on this new system. I will be looking into 2 GB (1024+1024) as soon as I can afford the upgrades.)

Storage
250 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA II hard drive

Total size of hard disk 250 GB
Primary hard disk 125GB Free (222GB Total)
Disk partition (C: ) 125 GB Free (222 GB Total)
Disk partition (D: ) 4 GB Free (11 GB Total)

Graphics
On Board NVIDIA GeForce 6100 nForce 405
PCI Express x16 Graphics slot available
Gaming graphics 318 MB Total available graphics memory - score 3.0
Display adapter type NVIDIA GeForce 6100 nForce 405 onboard chipset
Total available graphics memory 318 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 128 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 190 MB
(I know, I know I need to get a video card.)

Sound
Realtek High Definition Audio Chipset ~onboard sound

DirectX Version: DirectX 10

Media drive (E: ) CD/DVD
16X DVD +/- RW/RAM/CD-RW super multi-format dual layer drive

Will I need to reinstall fear from the disks on Vista to make sure it is in the registry properly or will just transfering the game files work fine? If I do need to reinstall with my messed up disk 5 I am screwed.

#5. If for some reason I do need to reinstall it on the new system, but can't because of the broken disk 5 is it wrong to obtain a new copy of it through what is considered "illegal" methods? (I will not say it here as the rules say not to mention them)
I mean I did buy it retail and have my own retail F.E.A.R. key and part number and it was no fault of my own that disk 5 got damaged. So in this case is it really wrong to just go re-get the game I already paid for? Or are there other "legal" methods that I can follow to get a new copy of my F.E.A.R. game without having to buy a new full retail hard copy again?

Thanks for any help.

[Joe Forster/STA]

Closed, forum rule #1. (Contact the publisher for a replacement.)