Fun C++ question

[vidogame]

In my computer class we just started working with pointers in Visual C++. We've all been trying to crash our computers just for fun using the pointers, but we haven't had much luck. Can anybody write a simple program that will mess up some memory and give me a BSOD?

[vidogame]

"Now programatically creating a BSOD has been successfully accomplished by MS for almost 10 years. Check their website for hints and tips."

Hahaha! I'm not paying for this class, it's a class in my high school.

[qball]

good, very good.

who pays for you're high school?

[qball]

Can't you find something useful to do?

Why don't you ask your teacher this question, you're (or someone) is paying for the class? Sound like my father, so let's have some fun...

I could be wrong, but about the worst thing that will happen to a pointer is being 'corrupted'. 'corrupted' means the data the pointer originally pointed to no longer resides in the memory address pointed to by the pointer. At best a memory leak, and there are easier ways to make memory leaks.

Now programatically creating a BSOD has been successfully accomplished by MS for almost 10 years. Check their website for hints and tips.

[vass0922]

It *should* be difficult to create a BSOD. It is essentially an "unhandled exception" most errors like that, should be successfully handled by any good OS. How to create one, I don't really know, maybe throw some bad data at some hardware like a vid card?
Especially if you have hardware with poorly written drivers, that would probably be the weakest point of failure.

[qball]

vass0922 (knows DBs), hacking HW is actually a good idea, but programatically you may never know what HW you're dealing with. Or, in your example maybe TNT chips fail, but Geforce and beyond barely burp.

Now programatically, I would attack system resources, RAM, OS/GUI resources , HD, CPU. Most winders OSes are atrocious at memory management. Programatically these can be accomplished rather easily (I wrote some straight HTML, that crashed browsers IE/Netscape2/3 and systems 95/NT4WS).

It is easy to write a program that just continues to open windows, thus rendering the system locked or useless until locked. One can write a program that just keeps writing 10 megs files to any available drives until they are full, then it writes 1 meg files, then 1k files....Insidious!

Now, I do not endorse malicious code in any sense, nor can I stop it, but one should learn from malicious code and be aware of potential security issues. Just to be a better programmer...

[cadetstimpy]

Create a program that initiates two twain sessions at once to the same virtual device.

[qball]

ren states,

post code.