Lets be clear about this, I do educate and I would move on if SF where honest about the mistakes and cleared up their mess. Instead peeps like myself have had to come along and get other peeps systems functional for them again.
An example of the ridiculously bad tech support SF gives:
Click Here to read a thread on Gamespot.
What was Ubisofts reponse to me curing the (Code 41) error for them and SF?
Ans: They shut down the SF thread on the Prince of Persia Section of their forums.
They are perfectly entitled to do that however snubbing the peeps that are saving their collective butts is not very good business sense. Its even worse that in fact I am an online journalist that owns a number of top gaming/tech support sites.
The hardware issues are annoyances and not everybody can afford to replace hardware before its time.
However this does not take away the more serious issue that Ring 0 to Ring 3 level programs access makes Sony's Rootkit look like something out of Kindergarten.
I am seriously trying not to scaremonger here, but lets have an example, I know plenty of Doctors that use their surgery PC's for playing games in the odd few minutes break they may get in an day. Heck they like to unwind just like anybody else.
How would you like your medical records broadcasted on the net or maybe somebody suddenly give you HIV positive status? Do you know how hard it is to get your records corrected?
This is just a minor infringement of Databases however it can be more serious than that.
SF is a Hackers dream, a program used by the industry, silently installed onto Gamers systems and leaves them wide open, no matter how good you’re anti spyware, anti virus or firewall is.
Even if those apps could detect it, SF have deals with every major Security Software manufacturer to ignore SF (This includes Microsoft!).
That may not bother you and that is entirely your own choice, but I fully understand what this means and it goes far beyond being able to run a specific game.