TABLE OF CONTENTS This book has dealt with the mundane and pedestrian duties of an administrator, or a programmer acting as an administrator until now. It is about time we used some of the available tools for fun and profit, with an emphasis on fun. The Winternals group has created software that not only makes our administrative tasks easier, but also entertains us.
In this chapter, we will learn about a screensaver with a perverted twist to it. We also will find out how to modify the behavior of our keyboards to suit the needs of older users, create an informative desktop background, and finally, bypass the pesky login screen.
The Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD, is one of the most dreaded things that a computer user or administrator can see. Due to various resource conflicts, unstable drivers or dynamic link library (DLL) files, and other system issues, a system crash was once more a probability than a possibility and it always seemed to occur just in time to wipe out hours of work you had not yet saved.
If you look at it from a different point of view, though, the BSOD is a good thing. If the system crashed and just rebooted for no apparent reason, that would be bad. However, Microsoft had the forethought to design the system to display pertinent information about the system crash against a blue background, while dumping the contents of the memory to a file...
