Stupidity in Technologies

Its been quite a while since I updated this blog. Being a lazy bump with so many things to distract me.

Yesterday I have fed-up with my 1 year old DVD/CD-ROM/RAM multi burner. It has been "under-perform" for quite some months since. It is now burning a 4.5GB disk at 30 minutes per disk!!! What is happening?!?! At least the damn box advertised it was a 16x DVD burning, which is true when i started using it, it took under 10 minutes for a 4.5GB disk to complete.

So I went to my good pals asking for question. Google return some interesting answer. Certain article pointing to a copy protection program called "StarForce". Which will reduce the DVD-ROM speed and at certain point, render the drive unusable. Wikipedia in the mean time told me that StarForce are been used in a few games where I happen to played before.

According to BOYCOTTSTARFORCE, the starforce will trigger a windowsXP feature that will actually reduce the transfer rate of the drive from ULTRA DMA to the worst which is PIO. So following the site instruction, i removed the StarForce hidden driver. But the burner still slow as hell.

Then further questioning Google, there is a guy that come up with an idea to remedy this windowsXP "feature". This website list the whole story of this particular "feature" and remedy to it. And WALAH, my burner is able to burn at full speed again. Thanks "The DUCK" for its fantastic walkthrough.

Moral of the story, sometime technologies that is too "smart" will result in unwanted result.

PS. If u think your DVD-ROM is not behaving like it suppose to be, take a look at those webby.