Geek crying over Mac
The Mac OS X is a great OS. It comes bundled with some great hardware built into some fabulous design. The apps available for Mac OS X are far better than their Windows counter parts. So obviously, a lot of people are amazed by it.

The wise owls obviously either decide to go ahead and buy an Apple product for themselves, like this author did, or they decide to stick to their current OS thinking the MicroLord will churn out a better OS for them, yet knowing deep inside that it will be just another resource hungry monster which will render their slightly old hardware useless.

Ofcourse some choose to ride the path which leads to the Open Source Community. Many have chosen to use this and are wonderfully happy with it.

But then, there a separate breed of nerds who hack their way into the Mac OS X to make it run on any hardware. Now, many are already doing this effectively. But when some people decide to try their hand at Mac OS X just because they can, without thinking things out, things get nasty. It is often seen that they do something awfully wrong to their machines and then blame Mac OS X for being crappy OS, obviously ignoring the fact that it was not made to function in the way they intend to.

Take a look at the following conversation I recently had over IM. This dude got hold of a Mac OS X DVD from some source, installed it on his system and then starts blaming it.

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Today is the world of flash drives. Everyone you know now has a PD ( Pen drive ) and wants you to copy some files off your PC / Mac.

Now, unlike me, if you’re using the oh-so-prone-to-viruses Operating System called Windows, chances are that you might have already come across the ntdetec1.exe virus. Or you will, sooner or later.

Its official name is W32.Ceted and it is a worm that copies itself to all shared and removable drives and spreads when the user double clicks on it to open it. If a system is infected, it creates a folder called ntdetec1 in your System Drive which is NOT visible via Explorer or Command prompt.

Related files:
\ntdetec1\ntdetec1.exe
\ntdetec1\cmrss.exe
\ntdetec1\run.exe
\ntdetec1\shell32.exe
\ntdetec1\drivelist.txt
\ntdetec1\child\autorun.inf
\ntdetec1\child\ntdetec1.exe

Symptoms:
1. Task Manager closes as soon as it launches.
2. RegEdit may be inaccesible
3. Folder Options may be inaccessible

When I scanned using some anti-virus software, Nod32, Symantec AV Corporate, McAfee and AVG failed to detect the files, even in Safe Mode.

To remove it, run the following commands at the command prompt:

taskkill /im cmrss.exe
taskkill /im ntdetec1.exe
taskkill /im shell32.exe

Now, make sure you are in the root drive of your system. For example, if your Windows in installed in C:, make sure your prompt shows C:\>
Now, run the command..

attrib ntdetec1 -s -h /s /d

This will make the folder visible in explorer. Now you can Shift+Delete the folder from explorer.

Also, you might need to delete the following registry key (if it is present)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer\ Run\"winlogon" = "C:\ntdetec1\run.exe"

Congratulations, this will remove all known traces of the above worm.

And remember, next time you use someone’s PD, before you access it, goto your command prompt and delete the autorun.inf file if any.

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