Stupid PC tricks
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Once I removed the power cord from my collegue's computer and put some "invisible" tape on the prongs, then put it back into the outlet. Took him some time to figure out why the computer refused to start... :) On my college, some people found it amusing to remove all the key caps from the keyboards and put them back in random order.... Once, on a new job, a collegue asked me about my salary. Since the company generally had a little "hush-hush" regarding the salaries, I made a quick Delphi program that displayed a large window with randomly plotted pixels. Counting the pixels would reveal my salary amount (which in Sweden is a 5-figures number). I heard lots of bad words from him. Until, unfortunately one of his friends found a disassembler and managed to see the number... :-/
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Press Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow in a windows machine. How many know what this trick do and how to revert it?
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Try it. It's fun. Once you know how you get there, it's easy to go back to normal.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Let me start out by saying I'm not especially proud of this, but ages ago we had a VERY annoying QA guy who thought he was some kind of genius but in fact had the reading comprehension skills of lobotomized blind ferret. Despite the fact that the release notes would say things like "The DataBase functionality in the product is a UI stub at this time. DO NOT file any bug reports on the DataBase functionality not working properly. Issues in the UI are OK to report." he would go through the ENTIRE test suite for the DataBase functionality and file a bug reports on the missing functions. Every frickin' week. Then, the developers would have to waste time at bug triage answering questions or emails as to why there were 1,134,392 bug reports in the DataBase category, not to mention having to personally MARK and CLOSE each of the "bugs", each of of spending at least 2 or 3 precious hours every week on complete nonsense. Why ? Because we HAD to - it was the way the workflow for SQA was designed, and we had to follow it. The managers would have a fit because it made their charts look bad, and upper management would lean on them. "Uh, Pete, can you see why the find/fix ratio on the TPS Reports for your project is growing out of control ? That would be great. Oh, and remember to put the cover sheets on the TPS reports." Also (we did check this with legal) murder was still a crime, even in this context. This would go on for WEEKS at a time. We begged. We pleaded. To no avail. Finally, we'd had enough. The weekly build was scheduled for April 1st. March 31st I (and a couple of the developers) spent putting all sorts of little hacks together. We had a new system to load and execute modules with user-defined tasks at system startup, and it needed to be tested, right ? So we preloaded about a dozen nasty little hacks that were targeted solely to HIS machine. They had no effect on other machines. These did things like put up message boxes saying "Recoverable Application Fault: This application has been very naughty and needs to be spanked. Please contact your Systems Administrator.". We made the mouse cursor randomly move in the opposite direction of where it should, vertically, horizontally, or both, but not ALL the time. We'd hide the mouse cursor sometimes, but just for a little while. We put up a fake BSOD. We made the DataBase functionality APPEAR to work -- for a while. Streams of fake error messages in the Console poured out that made no sense. Message boxes of stunning complexity and nonsene popped up at ra
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Let me start out by saying I'm not especially proud of this, but ages ago we had a VERY annoying QA guy who thought he was some kind of genius but in fact had the reading comprehension skills of lobotomized blind ferret. Despite the fact that the release notes would say things like "The DataBase functionality in the product is a UI stub at this time. DO NOT file any bug reports on the DataBase functionality not working properly. Issues in the UI are OK to report." he would go through the ENTIRE test suite for the DataBase functionality and file a bug reports on the missing functions. Every frickin' week. Then, the developers would have to waste time at bug triage answering questions or emails as to why there were 1,134,392 bug reports in the DataBase category, not to mention having to personally MARK and CLOSE each of the "bugs", each of of spending at least 2 or 3 precious hours every week on complete nonsense. Why ? Because we HAD to - it was the way the workflow for SQA was designed, and we had to follow it. The managers would have a fit because it made their charts look bad, and upper management would lean on them. "Uh, Pete, can you see why the find/fix ratio on the TPS Reports for your project is growing out of control ? That would be great. Oh, and remember to put the cover sheets on the TPS reports." Also (we did check this with legal) murder was still a crime, even in this context. This would go on for WEEKS at a time. We begged. We pleaded. To no avail. Finally, we'd had enough. The weekly build was scheduled for April 1st. March 31st I (and a couple of the developers) spent putting all sorts of little hacks together. We had a new system to load and execute modules with user-defined tasks at system startup, and it needed to be tested, right ? So we preloaded about a dozen nasty little hacks that were targeted solely to HIS machine. They had no effect on other machines. These did things like put up message boxes saying "Recoverable Application Fault: This application has been very naughty and needs to be spanked. Please contact your Systems Administrator.". We made the mouse cursor randomly move in the opposite direction of where it should, vertically, horizontally, or both, but not ALL the time. We'd hide the mouse cursor sometimes, but just for a little while. We put up a fake BSOD. We made the DataBase functionality APPEAR to work -- for a while. Streams of fake error messages in the Console poured out that made no sense. Message boxes of stunning complexity and nonsene popped up at ra
PMFSL...
Jeffrey Buxton wrote:
Now THAT was over the line.
You know what I like most about that line in the sand... the whoosh noise as we run past it!!
------------------------------------------- Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Just bugger off and leave me alone!!
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Try it. It's fun. Once you know how you get there, it's easy to go back to normal.
hehe... that's a good one... but it is video card dependant...
------------------------------------------- Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Just bugger off and leave me alone!!
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I remember quite a while back at school i made a batch file that ran at boot time and printed the contents of a text file, which said something like "The printer has encountered an error. Press any key to continue..." No one complained:omg:, so after a while i simply took it off. Roswell:laugh:
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CAI did something similar, except I would netsend a random person's computer, "You must restart..." Kind of funny since some people actually believed it. I also remember making a batch file which had a netsended story, that was classic.. Oh, once I sent one of those cheap computer pranks that opens and closes your cd drive, my friend flipped. lol..:-D
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Years ago I was working onsite with a client who had a very strict PC security policy - basically anytime you were not at your computer, you had to have it locked... There was a new help desk fella there who got up and wandered away from his desk, so I used his open email to tender his resignation for him... muhahahahahaha!!! Luckily the boss was a friend of mine (who I had told about the "resignation" stunt shortly after I clicked send) so he played along, and the desky didn't really lose his job - but he did learn to lock his PC when he wasn't sitting at it!!
------------------------------------------- Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Just bugger off and leave me alone!!
Where I work right now, they have a similar policy. The day it went into effect and since I sit right next to the IT Admin, the moment I got up to drink some water (the cooler is about 2 meters behind us) he sent an email from my account to myself and a few other people. Figuring that he gave me a lesson, he cooled down. Two days later, I walked into the CEO's office to have a meeting (yes we can have meetings ANYWHERE in the company if a room is not in use) and God above, his laptop wasn't locked, so I sent him an email from his account. Three days after that, I sat down at my desk, peeked to the left and realized that my friend the IT Admin's computer wasn't locked. :cool: I sent an email out from his account to everyone in the company. :-D evil, and I love it :laugh:
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rick Cook "There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance." Ali ibn Abi Talib
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Where I work right now, they have a similar policy. The day it went into effect and since I sit right next to the IT Admin, the moment I got up to drink some water (the cooler is about 2 meters behind us) he sent an email from my account to myself and a few other people. Figuring that he gave me a lesson, he cooled down. Two days later, I walked into the CEO's office to have a meeting (yes we can have meetings ANYWHERE in the company if a room is not in use) and God above, his laptop wasn't locked, so I sent him an email from his account. Three days after that, I sat down at my desk, peeked to the left and realized that my friend the IT Admin's computer wasn't locked. :cool: I sent an email out from his account to everyone in the company. :-D evil, and I love it :laugh:
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rick Cook "There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance." Ali ibn Abi Talib
Yep, you know what they say... what goes around, comes around, and usually wants to stay for dinner!!
------------------------------------------- Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Just bugger off and leave me alone!!
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
I guess I was a little, um, naughty. On a Unix course at Cambridge Uni in UK (military tend to send us there for some reason). Lecturer says "Don't worry you can't break anything here, feel free to play". Soooooo, (Evil Laugh goes off in head), I wote a quick program called Rabbit that create a 1k file of crap, spawned another process which did the same thing, each process creating a new spawned process. So in a matter of minutes disc had filled up and crashed the server!!!! Quickly deleted all the file (rm -r *) and all was ok again. Not related to PC but I was always up to tricks. Filled my Sergeants locker with "Flo-Pack" (small polystyrene balls) whilst it waas on its back on the floor, stood it back up full the brim. 10 mins later he went to it, opened up and, whooooosh, 2 feet of "Flo-Pack" around his ankles. :-D
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hehe... that's a good one... but it is video card dependant...
------------------------------------------- Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Just bugger off and leave me alone!!
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OK.... did not see anything at all on my laptop. What should happen??? Extremely curious! :) Carl
Strange, it works on most systems. Ctrl+Alt+Arrow change the orientation of the screen. A reboot will not help you go back to normal. The only way to do it, is to press the proper key sequence.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Some windows 95 pranks I remember, renaming the windows directory to winders. Editing the win.ini to set the shell to clock.exe.
This blanket smells like ham
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
About 10 years ago a college of mine crafted a keyboard driver that ignored 1 out of 10 (or so) keystrokes, processing the rest as usual. He installed it at the PC of our CTO, who nearly smashed his keyboard in agony :)
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At university we had a lab full of Unix machines running X-Windows. So, when another student walked away from his desk, a friend of mine changed the mouse sensitivity in his logon script. (Something in .profile? Too long ago to remember) In fact, he changed it so that the values were negative, meaning that his mouse was totally inverted. I think this poor guy had logged in on pretty much every machine in the lab before he figured it out! There's also a BSOD screensaver[^] from SysInternals that's always amusing... ;)
Sunrise Wallpaper Project | The StartPage Randomizer | The Windows Cheerleader
muhahahah ... I know a colleague who's going to get this installed :)
'Howard
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
I've used to swap mice of two adjacent workstations when I was at university.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Haven't had time to read all the other posts (at work) so sorry if this has been covered already. I once had one of these free coke can holder joke programs that open up your CD drive. However, rather than just give it to my friend, I went on his computer and placed a shortcut to the program in his 'Startup' folder, and renamed the shortcut to something like 'Epson Print Manager' or something like that (also changed the icon). The result being that his cd drive would open everytime he switched on his PC, and it took him ages to find the cause ;P
Dominic Pettifer Blog: www.dominicpettifer.co.uk
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
We changed position of keys on the keyboard of a collegue of ours who was unable to type without looking at the keyboard. It was funny to look at him typing. :-D