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[Originally Posted by blabberer]well you can configure olly to get the symbols from ms server and as a newbie if you get yourself familiarised with ollydbg then
you can dive into kernel with windbg which is growing up pretty nice
only grudge i have against windbg at present is it needs two computers
anyway i really say sice isnt so much of neccessity and both the above options are free whereas sice isnt it  really i neither use ida nor sice |
thanks for the info on Olly. I consider myself an advanced newbie, so I'm not offering expertise on anything.
With regard to needing two computers for windebug, don't quote me on this, but I think Sysinternals has an app to bypass that and let you use it on one monitor. Maybe someone could confirm that.
For me, IDA is invaluable. Sometimes, in fact a lot of the time, a dead-listing will quickly show you things it would take a long time to discover otherwise. I'm not as advanced with it as I should be, but I can see how powerful it could be. I recommend learning it. It's very handy for locating code that needs to be patched and finding that code in an exe file.
My whole point here, however, is not to knock olly, or push softice. I was away from reversing for quite a while, and when I got back, XP was the vehicle. I needed it for other ventures, so I was faced with relearning a lot of stuff, particularly getting softice up on XP. I avoided it at first, then took the plunge.
It wasn't easy, but using the archives judicially and asking questions on the forum, I got enough information and clues to get a working system that was stable. I've faced that many times over the years, and all I was saying to Faxe, was to have more persistence. You reach points in reversing where something seems impossible, or too much work. Yet someone else has done it.
I took a couple of years of electrical engineering at university, although I didn't graduate. The work load in engineering (applied science) is almost double the load of other disciplines and the courses are often honours-level. A group of us studied together, and there were times when we'd collectively scratch our heads wondering how we were going to handle the workload. It seemed impossible. Yet, we managed to pull through in the end. The key was in ignoring the chatter in your mind
The human brain does not, and cannot, understand it's potential. Most of what we encounter in our conscious minds is what we knew in the past. It's often a storehouse of illusionary and useless junk. Creativity and insight are not normally available to the human conscious state.
When you face a problem in reversing, particularly as a raw newbie, you have to ignore the sometimes overwhelming feeling that you can't do something. That notion is just a thought...it's empty....no matter how strong it may seem. Of course, I'm referring to things that have already been done, and not new and advanced exploits outside the main reversing field.
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