Originally posted by: warcrow
What's up guys. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that I worked with Ars on some DRM investigation (I'm using that term lightly) and installed Spore a rediculous amount of times on several machines, talked with EA tech support, and reported my findings.
You might be surprised what we found out.
Putting EA's DRM to the Test
Although its a bit of a moot point with the upcoming revoke tool, I'd be quite a bit more interested to see what happens if you changed major hardware such as video cards or the OS on a machine that has it currently installed. Their DRM faq for the game did say that certain hardware changes can effect the activation. For instance:
For example:
- install spore on XP and upgrade to Vista
- install to both partitions of a dual boot XP/Vista PC
- change from onboard video to an nvidia card to an ati card
- image the drive its installed on and replace the HD in the PC
- image the drive its installed on and move it to another, preferably radically different, PC
- if you wanna get really wacky, install it in a VM inside of a PC that already has it installed in the host OS
I've always known based on the EA faqs that you could install it a zillion times on the same PC, but it was never clear when your system would be considered a "new PC" by the DRM. That was the real fear for me at least - not that I had three PCs to install it to, but that over time, my system would change enough for it to be considered more than three PCs.