re how to the disks copy protected kuo sheng kasey chang kschang sfsuvax sfsu edu wrote in article apr miavx acs muohio edu sjmadsen nextsrv cas muohio edu steve madsen writes this is not a good idea i upgraded my motherboard last fall i would have been quite pissed at any software that would have forced me to reinstall simply because i changed motherboards opinion is understandable i assume you have a tape drive not all of us have about floppies around for backup you know actually no i don t have a tape drive in the event of a total hard disk failure i reinstall the apps from originals and restore the data from the backups i keep of that with upwards of mb of stuff on my hard disk there is no way i m going to try and back it all up without a tape drive would be nice to have one though ram is something you add all the time so no it s more like bios manufacturer and or processor type etc data cannot be used esp with these new flash rom bios machines with updates on a diskette maybe maybe not today it doesn t happen as often i would hope but then if a bios is buggy and the user gets an upgrade the bios information is going to change at least the date anyway tagging the bios manufacturer is still going to falsely tag those users who upgrade the motherboard this type of upgrade doesn t require a hard disk backup restore on the other hand to make this less intrusive it could be disguised as please insert original disk xx as i need file yyyyyy for update it would be perfectly reasonable sort of as long as it wasn t done too terribly often otherwise i think it would get annoying and the user would go looking for other software this is silly it s much easier to loan disks to a friend and let them do an install than to backup your copy already on disk and then give them that your scheme isn t going to stop anyone of course it is easier are you saying then the originals should allow only one install what is your point of course not if something gets corrupted and my app needs to be reinstalled the worst thing i want that software telling me is this software has already been registered to blank and it is against the law to install it on other machines or something similar access for windows does this and it only requires a click on ok to go away pretty non intrusive but it gets the point across what i said was the program should have certain restriction such as the restrict to one machine until the program is registered with the manufacturer the manufacturer will then supply the then proven legitimate user with a patch that will disable the restriction and proudly proclaim the legal copy with the registered to xxx screen this is a great idea i like the key system that some shareware products use the only problem is that it will be difficult for big software companies to implement this without it getting very cost ineffective for them and more of a burden than a benefit to the users steve madsen sjmadsen nextsrv cas muohio edu ask me about linux the free unix
