Windows XPE

I have just finished hacking my first Windows Live setup - I have accelerated video drivers, audio, I can see movies using ffdshow, Mozilla Firefox, Total Commander, Norton Ghost, DirectX.

I have used BartPE and Sherpya WinPe Stuff.

The hard part was getting NVidia drivers to work and then the sound drivers. Now I can say that I have a better undestanding of manual loading of drivers on Windows XP :)

Pretty nice stuff, but you have to work to get it working...

Viewing CHM files from a Network Drive

This issue was bugging me for a long time, now I found out how to fix it.

All you need is this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions, with a DWORD entry MaxAllowedZone set to 1.

This was a side effect for a security patch from Microsoft.

Root Power

Writing rootkits is fun. I needed to a device driver for Windows XP that could hide a process, disable keyboard and mouse and hide directories, these are some definitions for a rootkit.

There are some inconveniences, like resetting the operating system because you did something wrong... things don't work like in userland.

Tools like Compuware VToolsD (for Windows 9x) and Compuware Driver Studio (for Windows NT+) make your life way easier. For the first you don't have to write code in assembler, you can write code in C and C++ and for the latter you can write code in C++.

I guess my next root kit, after the one for Windows 9x and the one for Windows XP, would be for Linux, but on Linux having access to the source code of the operating system is a big bonus.

In the end it's not that hard, with proper tools and with proper knowledge you can do anything :-)

Tarom

And now for my fist blog photo...

Brainbench

I've taken some Brainbench tests, now I have more than "Typing Speed & Accuracy" results :) Here is my public transcript.

And now for some pictures: