Can one piece of software completely mess up a computer?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve had my new computer for a week and its had no problems. A few days ago bought and downloaded a copy of Silent Hunter III from Fileplanet’s Direct2Drive. After playing it for about 45 minutes, my computer hard locked. I reset it and it blue screened with “UNMOUNTABLE DISK VOLUME” (or something like that). I reset it again and Windows ran scandisk. Scandisk reports that it fixes a few problems in $I30, and after that it boots up normally. After about an hour it hard locks again in IE. I reset it and it goes through the same process. The computer kept locking up to the point where I couldn’t use it anymore, and it wouldn’t even boot up in safe mode.

Not being able to boot up at all, I was forced to reformat. After setting everything up, one of the first things I installed was Silent Hunter III. I played it for an hour then went to eat dinner. When I came back, I opened IE and it hard locked almost immediately. When I reset the computer Windows runs scandisk and reports the same problems with $I30. It fixes them, but this time it locks up in scandisk. When I reset again it wouldn’t boot up at all, not even in safe mode.

At this point I figure that something is wrong with one of the harddrives, but since it was the weekend tech support was closed. So I reformatted one more time, but this time I didn’t install Silent Hunter III. It’s been 2 days and no problems. Is it possible for one popular, legitimate game to screw up a harddrive like that, or am I finding a correllation where there is none? A quick google search shows nothing related to the game and this type of problem.

2

…in particular, a lot of people have it crash after an hour or two:
http://forums.ubi.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/2881085392/m/6011061492
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3

Some of the nastier copy protection schemes used on computer games will do things like permanently install new device drivers and modify your operating system. This can cause you a lot of grief if your system is incompatible with the copy protection software.

See Boycott StarForce. They list Silent Hunter III as one of the games affected.

4

Just ask Sony how unstable and/or vulnerable copy protection applications can make your computer. :stuck_out_tongue:

5
      • Yea, but StarForce is a CD-protection scheme isn’t it? And Direct2Drive is a game-download service. There is no CD involved to protect.

But many people do seem to be having the same problem with that game. So I’d bet that’s what the problem is.
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