In ,
William R. Walsh typed on Mon, 4 Jan 2010 02:00:19 -0600:
Hi!

I am working on my niece's D610 and her optical drive is a Philips.
And it is currently having problems with any DVD with copy
protection.

Is it really any DVD?

It appears so. As it fails to load Sims2 and Sims3 games on DVD (they
are copy protected) and any copy protected DVD media quits just seconds
before the one hour mark. Non-copy protected DVD flies right on through.

The drive itself shouldn't really care, it only relays the encrypted
data for the decoder to handle. Some of the more "interesting"
approaches to DVD copy protection (Sony's ARccOS would be one) will
give a DVD decoder a reason to head for the hills. You might try a
newer decoder program?

I ran Nero DiscSpeed on the drive. Copy protected DVDs would fail and
non-protected ones flew right on by with flying colors. And my niece
wanted to play Sims3 on her Dell D610. And half way through the install,
it would complain it couldn't read a file. I clicked on ignore and it
would continue for awhile and the same error and file. Repeat a few more
times and 5 hours later the progress bar would be at 100%, but it won't
ever finish.

I threw an external USB optic drive and it installed in 20 minutes
without any problems. It also played copy protected DVD movie disc just
fine too on the external.

You would think the drive wouldn't care about copy protection, but some
drives do. There are many cases of some drives don't like some copy
protection. I have one copy protected audio CD that will stop after the
seventh song on some players. Even if you have repeat set.

One has to wonder why they dream this stuff up. It does *nothing* to
stop real piracy, foils "soft" piracy for only a while, and only
frustrates the legitimate customer.

They seem to back off a bit when it frustrates the legitimate customer
too much. Plus I feel they make extra money from copy protection from
legitimate customers. Maybe that is why they do it. As I and I bet many
other customers end up buying retail copies of the same thing over and
over again.

Like my niece thought her Sims3 disc was bad and went out and bought
another brand new one. Her original one wasn't bad in this case, but I
bet people buy extra copies all of the time like this. And sometimes the
original one does goes bad.

This also happens with Windows too. As many still has the recovery disc
that came with their computer. But since they upgraded something, like
the sound card or video card. Now the branded Windows recovery disc may
not even be able to boot up. As the drivers are now wrong. So what do
the legitimate user usually do? Go out and buy a retail version of
Windows, when they shouldn't have to do this. Sad isn't it?

I updated the firmware, but no help. I may end up replacing the drive
and I welcome any hints how to on a D610.

I'd have to think that it would come out easily, as many Latitude
models have removable drives. On some models, there is a security
screw that goes into the bottom of the machine and locks the release
lever for the drive/module so it won't come out.

Yes it does come out very easy. Thanks again.

--
Bill
Gateway MX6124 ('06 era) 2 of 3 - Windows XP SP3