Vista DRM Issue

Never one to pass up a good deal, I was able to get a new Q9650 Quad Core processor at a good price. I replaced the E8400 Dual Core in my main Rig, updated the bios and fired her up. I am running Vista Ultimate x64 in this machine and it started right up and I just had to open Task Manager and see all four cores looking good.

After the obligatory re-activation, I ran the Vista performance benchmark for the experience Index and I am now 5.9 across the board with 8 Gig RAM, 8800GTS video, and a WD Raptor 150 Gig Drive.

Then I opened up Media Center and I encountered the first of my issues. Error windows popped up about the receiver service not working and Digital Cable device registration application stopped working errors started opening up.

As it turns out Vista DRM is tied to the CPU so you need to delete the DRM cache. Open up an explorer window and go to the tools menu on the toolbar. If you do not see the toolbar, hit the alt key and it should appear. Go to folder options and choose the "view" tab.

Select the show hidden folders and unselect the Hide Protected Operating System Files. Then go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM. Make sure it is the correct DRM folder, there is another DRM folder one level up and it is empty. If I am feeling cynical I think it is a decoy to confuse people. Inside the correct DRM folder there should be some files like this.





Now delete all of the file inside of the DRM folder but not the DRM folder itself. Then log off and reboot for good measure. You may want to reset the folder view options back to their default options. Now the annoying errors should be gone Media Center should be working fine again.