SecuROM in The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection

Reclaim Your Game - Sims 2 Ultimate Collection and SecuROM
Sims 2 Ultimate Collection and SecuROM
by Lisa Pham
28th July 2014 11:00 AM
As you may know, EA released a full collection of our beloved Sims 2 and decided to give it away free to anyone who had Sims 2 registered in their Origin account… then because of the high demand, they decided to give it to anyone who had an Origin account. What they didn’t tell anyone was that they had implemented SecuROM into the mix.

So, EA did their usual and didn’t inform us of them doing this, and here I was worried about having to have ORIGIN on my PC… I didn’t even think to check for SecuROM.

When Maryh mentioned to me that some simmers were asking if there was SecuROM in the new Sims2 version I decided to take a look under the hood. I then found EA had put SecuROM Version 07.40.0009 in their nice Free Sims2 Ultimate Collection which they plan to sell in their store soon.

We’ve done screenshots of a few files and registry keys in which people may want to know of in the event of troubleshooting purposes. As far as we know EA has decided to provide everyone a free, but unscrubbed copy of Sims 2 Ultimate Collection, which is no different to the previous versions of Sims 2 that EA have supplied / sold in the past.

Please let me know if people are having issues with SecuROM / Sims 2. So far with my initial playthrough, everything was okay. The issues I came across was accessing some files and registry keys in which SecuROM had denied me (admin) access.

Checking with ProtectionID:
The Game exe


A known SecuROM file- paul.dll


For more proof… look through this zipped file.

I’ll be uninstalling Origin, SecuROM and the Sims 2 Ultimate Collection today and if anyone else wants to do the same, but need help with removing SecuROM, you can use this as your guide.

UPDATE…
Trying to remove Sims2 UC, Origin and SecuROM… all is successful except a SecuROM License key in the registry won’t delete at all. I will have to work on this further and hopefully I can find a way for it to be deleted.

UPDATE - 2…
Thanks to Nalia over at SimCave reminding me about trying TrashReg, I was able to delete the SecuROM License key from the registry. Although it didn’t work years ago, this newer version does do the trick. So, I’ve updated the SecuROM removal instructions at the bottom to incorporate using TrashReg to delete those stubborn registry keys.
http://www.reclaimyourgame.com/content.php/387-Sims-2-Ultimate-Collection-and-SecuROM

Apparently, after doing a little research, it seems that SecuRom is a protection measure created to limit a serial key from being used in several machines. Uninstalling the application itself doesn't actually remove the SecuRom lines from the registry, which leads some people to consider it a form of "spyware" installed in their machines, without their consent. Nowadays there's a SecuRom removal tool for these purposes. I've heard a few of the "horror" stories related to SecuROM but mostly they're just costumers that got upset about their User's Rights being infringed this way.

There's really nothing to be worried about, at least in terms of security, but some people are still going to freak out... If it doesn't bother you then it doesn't bother you.