Share your computer pranks!

Chieftess · Mar 22, 2005

munzy said:
Been named earlier but I am guilty of these: net sends with loops (1 mil net sends causes a lot of noise and windows ), X-window popups in Solaris (made people think that they had to shutdown the server because of horrible hard drive crashes), and screen capture of desktop then hiding the icons in a new folder

Ever moved an icon "off" the desktop?

(or rather, off the viewable area). That might drive a newbie crazy.

homeyg · Mar 23, 2005

Yeah but you can't move it off all the way. 1 pixel will still be in view to the right side and you can't do much in the way of the left side either.

EDIT: Unless the whole desktop isn't on the screen, then it is possible.

puglover · Mar 29, 2005

My little sister (she's 8) had a background of her holding one of her baby gerbils. She hated Gollum from Lord of the Rings (gave her nightmares), and as a prank I changed her background from gerbil to the most frightening picture of Gollum I could find. I let her have the computer, she clicked on her identity, and expecting a gerbil picture got a nasty surprise. :evil:

Boy I got in trouble for that one.

Chairman Meow · Apr 1, 2005

Chairman Meow said:
Thinking of computer "pranks"....

... (didn't do the original prank, too dangerous...)

edit - Although a less dangerous prank would be to simply place a Knoppix CD in the CD drive... that would do the trick, and reduce the chance he'll kill me

A variation of this prank has been put into effect... I found a Linux live-CD that looks very similar to Windows 98, so in the best case scenario he'll think I've simply switched his Windows XP theme to the "Classic" theme, until he tries to find Internet Explorer...

EDIT - To update... I came back from class to find that he had found it while I was in class, turned it off and removed the CD. No retaliation that I know of had been done against my computer. A bit disappointing...

homeyg · Apr 4, 2005

Chairman Meow said:
A variation of this prank has been put into effect... I found a Linux live-CD that looks very similar to Windows 98, so in the best case scenario he'll think I've simply switched his Windows XP theme to the "Classic" theme, until he tries to find Internet Explorer...

EDIT - To update... I came back from class to find that he had found it while I was in class, turned it off and removed the CD. No retaliation that I know of had been done against my computer. A bit disappointing...

Gogf · May 26, 2005

Chieftess said:
Ever moved an icon "off" the desktop? (or rather, off the viewable area). That might drive a newbie crazy.

How do you move things to a non-visible area? How to you acess this area to get them back

?

Chieftess · May 26, 2005

Gogf said:
How do you move things to a non-visible area? How to you acess this area to get them back ?

1 - Put the icon you want to hide on one edge of the monitor, and another icon in the center of the screen. Now, select both icons, and move the center one to the edge, and release. The one icon is now "hidden". Make sure align by grid and auto align are off.

2 - Make your monitor resolution larger.

Or, turn on the auto align.

vbraun · May 26, 2005

homeyg can you post the link to your net send program?

Ginger_Ale · May 26, 2005

It's here.

homeyg · May 26, 2005

Ginger_Ale said:
It's here.

Yep, that's it. Just a reminder, it doesn't have a fancy interface (no windows). I was in a major hurry to get this thing done when I was writing it so I didn't have time.

vbraun · May 26, 2005

It keeps telling me "Failed becasue of invalid message alias."

homeyg · May 27, 2005

vbraun said:
It keeps telling me "Failed becasue of invalid message alias."

Were you using it on a network? At school? At home?

vbraun · May 28, 2005

A Network at home.

RedWolf · May 28, 2005

Once, back in the day my little brother's friend was over at our house. (Not really a friend - just someone he knew from school)

Anyway he wanted to borrow one of my games and I told him I never give out the original disks so no he couldn't have it. Anyway he took them anyway.

A few days later one of my brothers friends was at this guys house, saw the disks, knew they were stolen and he stole them back for us.

I was angry that I had been stolen from so I created a batch file that would delete the game from the hard drive (since I knew the default installation directory and he wouldn't have deviated from that), replacing it with a text file saying basically "Screw you"... Then I disguised the entire thing as a DOS installation program and got my brother to offer this "cool" shareware game to this guy (pretending we didn't know about the theft). The shareware of course didn't exist and instead of a real install it ran my trojan horse which deleted the stolen software from his PC.

My friend wanted me to REALLY screw up the guy's computer by blowing away important windows files (and it would have been just as easy to do) but I didn't have the heart considering it was probably a shared family computer.

Also on a simpler note - my friend's grandfather used to get a kick out of putting screensaver passwords on the PC's at COSTCO and then asking the employees to give him demos of the PC's after the screen saver kicked on.

homeyg · May 28, 2005

vbraun said:
A Network at home.

Wait, are you using more than one word as the 'FROM' name? If you are, that's what's causing the problem. Computer ID's must be one word (which includes letters, numbers, etc.).

If not, I'll have to think about it some more.

I think I'm going to fix the code that let's the user know that it isn't working because of that.

Kejixu · May 28, 2005

I have this program called freeze. When you run it, everything freezes and ctrl-alt-delete won't even work. If you do press ctrl-alt-delete, a little popup screen saying that your not that smart.

vbraun · May 29, 2005

homeyg said:
Wait, are you using more than one word as the 'FROM' name? If you are, that's what's causing the problem. Computer ID's must be one word (which includes letters, numbers, etc.).

If not, I'll have to think about it some more.

I think I'm going to fix the code that let's the user know that it isn't working because of that.

I'm pretty sure I'm only using one word for the From name. I'm not at home so I'll have to try later.

Mise · May 29, 2005

I made a program that's basically a server, and when the client connects he can run anything that can be run from Start->Run. So I can type http://www.anywhere.com and it opens his favourite browser to that website! It can also make the screen resolution change (I like changing it to 640x480), and it automatically puts itself into the registry to run on startup. It's not very good though, because, although it's hidden from the user, it still comes up in the crtl-alt-delete under Applications

.

homeyg · May 29, 2005

vbraun said:
I'm pretty sure I'm only using one word for the From name. I'm not at home so I'll have to try later.

Also, make sure that your messaging service is started by going to the command prompt and typing 'net name'. If the messaging service is not started, it will ask you if you want to start it.

ArmOrAttAk · Jun 1, 2005

Not really a prank, one time I checked out a buddies computer. I opened autoexec.bat and typed in:

echo eric was here
pause

A year later when I saw him again he told me he was still trying to figure out how to get rid of that.

I did the same thing to another buddy who had just finished some network engineering training.
He reformatted and password protected the bios so I couldn't start up.

Share your computer pranks!

Moderator

Deity

Disturber of Worldviews

Class IV

Deity

Indescribable

Moderator

Raytracing

Lurker

Deity

Raytracing

Deity

Raytracing

Deity

Deity

Warlord

Raytracing

isle of lucy

Deity

Warlord

Similar threads