CD copy protection...

[vovan]

I have this question:

Some of the games on my laptop exibit a certain strange behavior from time to time. More often than not, they work fine, but sometimes, when I start a game, either by directly running the executable or through the autoplay of the game's CD, it starts just fine at first, but as soon as the screen turns black, it minimizes. The game is still running, but when I try to expand it, it just minimizes again.

This first happened last fall, when I bought Syberia. It did that a couple of times, but worked perfectly thereafter, so I forgot about the glitch, dismissing it as some fluke.

Now, I've been playing WC3 a lot recently, and it has started doing that to me, too. I bought the game when it first came out, and played it a lot on my desktop. Now, I've been playing SP a lot recently, too, and it worked just fine. But yesterday, it did that - minimized right after the launch. Worked fine after a reboot. Today it did the same. Reboot didn't help.

Now, I tried playing SimCity4, and sure enough, it happened again! Only it's never happened with this game before.

So, the question is: could this be caused by the CD drive dying and not recognizing the copy protection properly, or is it something else?

Thanks for any help.

EDIT: Oh, and to answer the question you might have right away: all the games are legal. No rips or anything.

[Asher]

Edited by Ming...

If the crack program is NOT authorized by the Game company, it is illegal. It's that simple.

Apolyton does not support or condone the illegal use of Game Software.

If you continue to discuss using cracks to get around copy protection the posts will be deleted, and you will get restricted.

[Skanky Burns]

Agreed.

[Inverse Icarus]

many games (wc3 included) have issues with Laptop CDROMS (mainly CDR / DVD). Infact, when wc3 came out, it didn't run at all on [edit: certain] laptops.

[Urban Ranger]

Copy protection is a royal pain in the arse. Offenders should be hung by their balls (if applicable).

[Inverse Icarus]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Copy protection is a royal pain in the arse. Offenders should be hung by their balls (if applicable).

and what if n/a? nipple clamps?

[Traianvs]

well usually it is applicable as most game programmers are of male human species


Btw the problem you have seems more like a driver problem or something with a ****ed windows or so

start with defragging and cleaning up your HD, also download the latest drivers for your graphics card (because the games you mention are quite recent, btw you do have a new directx version right!!?) if that doesn't work i suggest reinstalling windows... which you should do once in a while anyway so you could take this opportunity

My personal experience tells that these kind of things have something to do with either windows or graphics card drivers, but i'm sure that there are techno nitwits here that probably know a better solution to this

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by UberKruX
and what if n/a? nipple clamps?

Nah, I am lenient wrt to women I'll just blame it on her superior or subodinates, whichever is applicable.

[vovan]

It might be the graphics card, but if that is the case, I would imagine this would happen all the time, and it only happens very rarely so far.

As for cleaning up the hard drive and reinstalling windows - I am planning on doing it this summer. I am currently spending lots of time doing actual work on my laptop, so a couple of days of it being out of order due to reinstalling the OS and all the programs would be out of question. But during the summer days, I'll have plenty of time to do that, hopefully.

As for drivers, yep, they are all new.

[Traianvs]

eh, on my computer reinstalling wonwids just takes like what 1 hour or something


also, defragging yer computer.. easy, just let it run the programme at night, and when you wake up all the work is done

And no it doesn't have to happen all the time, anyway what else could it be ffs? no idea, unless more information is given...

Perhaps a virus , I had one that crashed my programmes more and more as time passed, so after a month i could hardly start up windows , and shortly thereafter my whole computer was fooked LOL!

Funniest virus I had though was a virus that flipped my screen colours

Everything white turned into fluorescent orange , lol, pretty horrible to work on yer computer with that stuff, fortunately, I managed to get rid of the virus => reasonably softie virus


arfg timez for mbed, too jmuch beer!

[vovan]

Originally posted by Trajanus
eh, on my computer reinstalling wonwids just takes like what 1 hour or something

Well, that's if you only have to install windows... I also need:

Office
Visual Studio
MS SQL Server
Maple
and on and on. It will take a couple of days to reinstall all the crap I have to use in class.

EDIT: Oh, and as far as defragging goes... I have a 40GB harddrive. For the windows defragger to work, it needs 15% of free space, which is... 6GB or something. I don't have nearly that much free space.

[Nubclear]

Edited by Ming...

"."

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by vovansim
Well, that's if you only have to install windows... I also need:

Office
Visual Studio
MS SQL Server
Maple
and on and on. It will take a couple of days to reinstall all the crap I have to use in class.

Ghost a fresh installation. Saves lots of time.

[vovan]

What program would you recommend for a ghost? I am currently in kind of a tight financial situation, so I wouldn't want to buy something very expensive...

[Urban Ranger]

I have only used Norton Ghost (surprise! ) because it does everything I need. You don't need it often (hopefully), but it is a great time-saver when you do.