Funny Computer Pranks

[LordShiva]

I took a screenshot (using PrintScreen) of a friend's desktop, then hid all his icons and his taskbar and set the screenshot as his wallpaper. It was funny as hell.

Back when I had a roomate (freshman, sophomore year of college), I would Remote Desktop into my computer in my room, and had it configured so that sounds would play on that computer's (rather than the remote computer's) speakers. I'd turn the volume up and play really bad music or fart sounds or whatever. That pissed him off.

Then there's the old "switch the keyboards and mice of the computers in the college computer lab" trick. Or the "switch keys on a keyboard" trick, which really messes with people who can't type.

[Ari Rahikkala]

I took a screenshot of my desktop and set it as my desktop wallpaper...

... and then I realised that I don't have any icons or a taskbar anyway

[Sirotnikov]

There are several evil tricks you could play.

First, there are all sorts of windows Accessibility options, such as "sticky keys" and "filter keys" and "toggle keys" and "sound sentry" which can drive people mad.

What's best is that since no one uses it - no one knows how to solve it! Not even IT departments, since no one ever looks in the "accessibility options" but directly in the "keyboard" section.

It gets people really crazy.


Also, you can play with the colors of "Word" documents, changing it to "white on blue" text. Actually a few people I did this to, liked it so much they ended up keeping it.

[Adagio]

You could always try to change the desktop to something really annoying like this:



Then hide the option for the user to change the desktop

[Ari Rahikkala]

Hm, nice. That thing's got nothing on the venerable http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/%7Eakitaoka/rotsnake.gif, though.

[Chemical Ollie]

Back in the old days, I set a friends Windows 3.1 screensaver to scrolling text, red on yellow background, with the message "THE MEGA-VIRUS WILL SOON EAT YOUR HARD DISK" and the timer 15 seconds. He had never used the screensaver option before, so he actually believed he had a virus and was very upset, until I told him what was the real problem.

About the same year, a bud changed the DOS promt on his room mates computer to A SERIOUS ALLOCATION ERROR HAS OCCURED IN SECTION EE6A78, CONTACT YOUR DEALER>
Then he set a password to access the DOS settings and put a Post-it on the monitor frame: The password is: "Jonas is a whore"

But you guys are to young to know what a DOS promt is, huh?

[realpolitic]

There was a game of galactic exploration, where you could name planets you discover, some gamers included invisible control characters, so when the computer asked which planet someone else wanted to go to, they wouldn't be able to go, because the others didn't know the control characters.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie

But you guys are to young to know what a DOS promt is, huh?

Some of us actually knows what a CP/M prompt is

[Tattila the Hun]

Originally posted by BlackCat


Some of us actually knows what a CP/M prompt is

I started with holes in cardboard cards. And there even weren't that many holes.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Tattila the Hun


I started with holes in cardboard cards. And there even weren't that many holes.

Well, I didn't wan't to scare the children here, so I didn't want to say anything about my first encounters with computers wich was purely punchcards

[Makahlua]

Well, there's always that good old chestnut of telling some n00b to use Alt-F4 for whatever function they're looking for

And what the bleepity bleep is up with that linked wallpaper? It moves

[-Jrabbit]

Ah, the good old days, walking around campus with a shoebox full of punch cards...

The big prank back then was to take one card and put it out of order in the victim's deck.

[Pekka]

I also like computer pranks. ONe of my favourite ones is to use the wlan of random people in this building. I find about half to be unencrypted so it's first of all fun to use their bandwidth and dl porn for all its worth.

Second of all, I love to capture packages and read their e-mail. Even better yet if someone has a weak encryption, I LOVE to run airsnort and break it, again, read their e-mail, perhaps even bank account information.

But what really makes me laugh is when I get their MAC addresses and clone mine to cause conflicts in the network and thus effectively fubarin all of our network connetions. Usually at that time I just use my other computer with cable connection to surf and laugh while others can't do their thing. After, of course, I've already read their e-mail so I'm not missing out!

[Jonny]

Originally posted by Ari Rahikkala
Hm, nice. That thing's got nothing on the venerable http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/%7Eakitaoka/rotsnake.gif, though.

Whoah, that thing's crazy...

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
Back in the old days, I set a friends Windows 3.1 screensaver to scrolling text, red on yellow background, with the message "THE MEGA-VIRUS WILL SOON EAT YOUR HARD DISK" and the timer 15 seconds. He had never used the screensaver option before, so he actually believed he had a virus and was very upset, until I told him what was the real problem.

About the same year, a bud changed the DOS promt on his room mates computer to A SERIOUS ALLOCATION ERROR HAS OCCURED IN SECTION EE6A78, CONTACT YOUR DEALER>
Then he set a password to access the DOS settings and put a Post-it on the monitor frame: The password is: "Jonas is a whore"

But you guys are to young to know what a DOS promt is, huh?

I did that first one as well My poor dad...

Except I wrote it as a program rather than as a screensaver, so it was somewhat less obvoius [it didn't exit in the normal screensavery way]. It also prevented CTRL-ALT-DEL so unless you manually rebooted, all it did was pretend to format your HD (it had a nice little progress bar that updated reasonably slowly to be believable) and then say have a nice day

And no, I wasn't channeling panag.