Stupid PC tricks
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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
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I sat next to a guy once who would play music all day much to the protest of the rest of our office. I knocked up a service we installed on his machine that would let us telnet to his machine and adjust the volume by typing a number between 1 and 10. Much hilarity resulted for a day or so as he was convinced that selecting text in Word was causing his volme to change randomly
Oh, I had to design a special trojan for my wife's sister and get her plant it in her laptop so I can force her to listen to music I like remotely using wireless;P I guess that was the meanest:laugh: ps. You can tell a loooooooooot from my signature:->
**Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.C:\Documents and Settings\Muammar>format /autotest c:_**
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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 did a similar thing to a member of my family. Before taking the screenshot however, I added several incriminating folders to the desktop, such as a 'porn' folder. After setting the desktop background, I removed the actual icons, so the folders were left apparently unselectable and hence undeletable! He saw the funny sie of it thankfully :)
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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.
One of my fellow student kept playing Spider solitair in class. And this distracted me and the other students. So I changed the Solitaire links in his pc to run the shutdown command. He soon stopped playing solitair in class. Maybe if he was paying attention he could figure out what was happening :laugh:
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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.
Giannakakis Kostas wrote:
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.
The only way to do it is to turn your monitor upside-down and google for the answer. :-D
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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 once found a description and an example for how to change HP laser printer's status text over the network. It uses some proprietary set of special commands which let you interact with the printer if you send them over the network. There was a C# example, so I edited it and compiled a small console application which could send random status messages (from an array, I think) or accept a message as a program argument and send it over to our team's laser printer - we had a HP LaserJet, don't remember which model exactly, they have a LED screen. Imagine how confused people were when they saw the printer complaining about "RADIATION LEAK" or "WATER IN FEEDER". :laugh: Radiation leak is my personal favorite. My manager even called a few fellow programmers to take a look at it - I was one of them. Of course I played dumb and was as much confused as the rest of my team.
Kind regards, Pawel Krakowiak
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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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I've used to swap mice of two adjacent workstations when I was at university.
My colleague did the same thing to two of our colleagues. It was so funny watching them with that shocking eyes (:omg:) when they moved a cursor for a another computer :laugh:. And I always turn on the caps lock when I am done in the lab :). Sad thing is, that I can't see the reactions :). And we used to play with netsend and those dead loops :laugh:, so SysAdmin turn off the netsend - bastard :laugh:. My colleague and I used to turn on caps when the other is logging on :laugh:, or pressing enter or a number on a numerical part of the keyboard. Funny thing is, that if you are wrong three times on the Win, you have to wait a while :laugh: - that was a real war :laugh:. I missed that :). That was the best times ever :).
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Several things we used to do in the good old call center... 1) Switch around the key caps :) 2) Change the mouse to left handed :) 3) Run a search on the system for all exe files and then create shortcuts to all of them in the computers start up group :) Nasty, I know, but it was fun :) ...unless that it someone hit you with it...
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Giannakakis Kostas wrote:
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.
The only way to do it is to turn your monitor upside-down and google for the answer. :-D
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Ooh ooh, I have another one! Back in the days of Quake 1 (Yes Quake ONE), it was quite fun doing up some quake mods in near C (a revelation at the time). So just for fun when we had a bunch of guys coming over to play some Quake, we did a quick mod so that if you did a certain command you turnd invisible, and if you did another you switched weapons to something that shot through walls :) Of course that only worked if your name was "pmartin" or the others on my team :) Much hilarity ensued that day!
Back in the days of Mac System 7, there was a boot-screen extension that came up black with a C:\> at the bottom in green. So that had to go on my colleague's Mac IIci, especially since I'd get in early and there weren't locks on his office and no password on his machine.... Then in grad school once, one of my colleagues was using an ORIGINAL Compaq (you know, with the 9-inch screen and the keyboard that doubled as a cover), and since I got in earlier than everyone else, I put a boot program in that started slow-typing the following message several times on the screen: Help me I'm trapped inside your computer The application deleted itself and the screen cleared after a minute or so. I also put one of the lab's stuffed animal mascots into the extra space in the machine. The grad student who turned the machine on was royally surprised....
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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 used to BCC my boss when Windows 95 came out and he could never figure out why he wasn't on the email list, but kept getting my messages. Had him reboot a few times before I stopped doing that.
"The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people." - E. B. White Web - Blog - RSS - Math - LinkedIn - BM
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I thought I invented the screenshot of the desktop, maybe I did it was a long time ago. Except I used to take all the real icons off and put them in a folder. Well if that ones taken then the oldest one I can lay claim to is back in high school we had Commodore SuperPets in the computer classroom all connected to a single printer via a device called a Mupet which was some sort of printer buffer. I found the manual and learned how to put text in the buffer that would print the next time someone else printed. That was fun and quite rude. We also found the manual to the superpets and found out you could control a *lot* of the hardware by poking values into memory locations. Crazy things like the actual focus of the CRT gun not sure the exact technical terms but I remember we could make the screen entirely backwards or expand it bigger than the actual screen but the best trick of all was shrinking the whole screen down to a single dot in the center which unfortunately killed the display pretty quickly. It looked cool though, this bright burning green spot in the middle of a black screen. I really don't know why they left the manuals for that stuff laying around, it was just asking for trouble.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
I used to do the poking stuff on the Pet too. The backwards text and the "tennis court" looking screen were fun.:cool:
"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."
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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.
My son topped any tricks I did. When he was in the 10th grade (public school system), the teacher that taught the computer lab didn't know much more about computers than our family collie, so she depended on my son as the "sys admin". He wrote a program in QuickBasic to emulate the DOS prompt, and put it in the autoexec.bat of each lab PC, and the teacher's. Whenever you typed in a DOS command, it gave some smart-alek answer, sometimes executed the command it was given, and occassionally threatened to wipe the hard drive. When the teacher saw the behavior in 1st period class, she freaked. She called the principal, tellign him a virus had attacked the comptuers. The principal was just about to call for some expensive help when Sam confessed. He showed them how simple it was to figure out and remove his little EXE. He got detention for a week, but they still needed him to be the free sys admin. Now, of course, he was always supervised. And yes, today he is a 33 year old programmer and consultant.