ARay Scanner is a general purpose scanner and will search for a number of different protections on your CD’s.

When you start the program up for the first time this will be the first screen that will come up. The top white box is where the CD name will be displayed. The second box is where you can select a different CD drive if you have more than one installed. Finally the other black boxes are where information on your CD will be displayed.

The first thing to do is to go into the options menu. To do this hit the Options button. Here you can set the program to scan files that are larger than 20mb. Normally files that are over 20mb will be video files and things of that nature. Here you can also add ARay Scanner to your contect menu. This means that it will show up when you right click on a file so that you can scan it for copy protection.

Now it is time to insert the CD that you want to check. To change to a different CD drive click on the second drop down window. Once you have inserted the CD you will see the name of the CD appear in the top box and the icon of the CD appear in the left hand corner. As you can see the information in the black boxes has changed to show information about the new CD that has been inserted. Here I have inserted Space Colony into the drive.

The next thing to do is to hit the Scan button. The program will then try to identify the protection on the CD. While it is working the items in the bottom lefthand corner will change as it tries to identify the copy protection. Also in the righthand corner is a countdown timer.

Now the program has finished scanning the CD. As you can see it has found SecuROM 4.85.00.005 on the CD.

That’s it for the scanning of the CD. This program does however offer a Sector Scan. Here as you can see it has foud the SecuROM protection but it can’t tell the version of it.

If you click on the Scan Directory button you will be taken to a window where you can choose the directory you want to scan.

Once again it will try to find the copy protection in the directory you have choosen. Note the larger countdown number at the bottom on the righthand side. Don’t worry this will fly down.

Here you can see that it has found the same copy protection in the program directory as it did on the CD. However as you may notice it has found a different version of it. The version it has found is 4.87.04.0008. This is because the latest patch applied to the game has changed the copy protection version on it.

That’s it for the copy protection scanning features of this program.