a sure way to hang my DELL XP box

[markhu]

The first time this happened I was astounded. So after rebooting, I tried it again and it happened just the same.

1. issued this command from a command prompt window:

Code: Select all

C:\> wmic.exe /output:clipboard computersystem get oemlogobitmap

2. Pasted into an empty document in TextPad 4.7.3

3. machine was totally hung. no mouse, no keyboard, no CTRL-ALT-DEL

Note that this procedure does not create a crashing file machines with a non-DELL installation of Windows XP. In other words, I think there must be some binary/Unicode data in the OEMLogoBitmap property in order to reproduce the problem. It might happen on other OEM installs such as Compaq/HP, etc.

Alternate methods: download this file: http://www.hudsonic.com/pub/oemlogobitmap-dell.zip
unzip it and try opening it in your TextPad. It hangs my other machine too.

More info about my environment: (gleaned from C:\> wmic.exe computersystem get manufacturer,model /value && wmic os get name,version,servicepackmajorversion /value )

Manufacturer=Dell Inc.
Model=Optiplex GX280

Name=Microsoft Windows XP Professional
ServicePackMajorVersion=2
Version=5.1.2600

[MudGuard]

The unzipped txt opens without any problem on my Win2K Textpad 4.7.3
One line with
OEMLogoBitmap and some 22000 spaces
and one line with lots of comma-space separeted numbers in {}

Opening it in binary shows it is a UTF-16 file, with Byte-order-Mark (FF FE) and then two bytes per character.

(Quite a waste of space, I did not find a single character outside the 7-bit US ASCII range)

I tried running the command you gave but it says wmic.exe is not a known command. I searched my whole harddisk for it but didn't find it.

[markhu]

WMIC comes with Win XP. I think it can be retrofitted to Win2k from Microsoft dowloads.

The unzipped txt opens without any problem on my Win2K Textpad 4.7.3

...

wmic.exe is not a known command. I searched my whole harddisk for it but didn't find it.