It feels rather strange reviewing a software program that does absolutely nothing. If you start Dud it will immediately terminate its process using 60 Kilobytes of computer memory in the short meantime. The question that is probably in your mind right now is about the usefulness of a program like Dud. Why would someone want to run a software program that terminates a second after execution?
The answer is simply: Dud has been designed by the software developer to replace annoying executables and programs that are started by the Windows operating system or applications. Mentioned are files like helpctr.exe or stobject.dll which are not useful to most users or necessary at all.
The developer has created a second program called Replacer which can be used to replace protected files in operating systems such as Windows XP or Windows 2000. It can for example also be used to replace the annoying googleupdate.exe, ctfmon.exe and basically any other annoying process that gets automatically started by the operating system or software programs.
It might make more sense in certain situations to find a way to disable the process or service so that it does not get started at all but this is sometimes not possible. That’s where a program like Dud comes in very handy.
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Why does a program, that does nothing, needs 60kb memory and is about 3kb in size?
A zero-byte exe file does the same thing …
i wonder where the inspiration comes from… really weird. =P
“A zero-byte exe file does the same thing …”
No it would not :S
Windows will show a error and start to find a solution, which would be more ignoring that just to run the original program.
The mem I don’t know about (I blame windows, heh), but the size I do. It’s from the icon. Oddly enough, it’s not the first time I’ve heard this question:
http://www.virtualplastic.net/msgboard/thread.php?forum=1&thread=340
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grigri:
“That dud file is a neat idea… but how come it’s 3k? That sounds huge for a file that does nothing, surely it could be done in less?
A quick test in masm gave me a 1KB exe (the PE standard minimum), aggressively optimizing in VC6 gave me 460 bytes. What did you program it in? You must have overridden the default stack and heap allocation to get the memory consumption down, so it must be a “real” programming language.
I know this sounds really pointless, because 3KB is nothing anyway, but it’s the principle of it!
–edit–
duh! Yours has got an icon in it, that’s why.”
Sounds like IEFBR14
This is not a new idea. About a year ago I used the JustBasic programming language to create a win32 executable that does nothing. I was then able to fix a computer infected with an awkward to remove virus by replacing the virus executable with my ‘do nothing’ one.
i really liked the replacing idea…
i’ll try and see what happens in this shitty windows world ^^