
	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.

	Any info in the BIOS is too volatile to use as a checksum.  Are you
going to require that a user re-install all their software if they add 4Mb
of RAM to their computer?  I did that a couple of weeks ago.  It's in the
BIOS, and if software had told me "this isn't the machine you installed me
on" I would never have used that software again.  Really bad idea.


	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.


	Do you know any assembly language at all?  All anyone needs to do if
find the part of the code that does the quiz, and insert a JMP instruction
to just completely skip it.  Not that difficult, really!  And there is very
little that commpanies can do to stop this type of thing.  Using PKLITE or
some similar utility would help, but only if the resulting compressed .EXE
were tagged as uncompressable.


	This is by far the best idea you presented in your post.  Making it
plainly obvious who registered is going to stop casual pirates. But, the
determined ones are just going to answer "Joe Blow" to the question of
"what's your name" so this won't stop them in the long run.

	Pirates are always going to win this fight.  They simply have more
time to work on the software and figure out the protection scheme.

--
Steve Madsen
sjmadsen@nextsrv.cas.muohio.edu