Stupid PC tricks
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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.
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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.
For a while, we all knew the root password here. We got into a kill -9 war, terminating each other often. That didn't last long.:doh: We installed keyboard drivers that randomly switched keys every few minutes. We installed new wierd fonts like chalkboard, scribble. (Dos days). A guy recorded a very load scream as the startup sound on a mac.:~ Every office on our floor heard it. We did the desktop trick, and the fake BSOD screensaver. We did the fake typer opening the Format screen and formatting the C drive.
"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.
Back in college we had a design lab with just two computers in it. That means that there was hardly a free computer to use and all these silly underclassmen kept using it. So one of the design groups and I removed all the desk icons except for the ones you can't, like the trash can. We took a screen shot put it as the background then put the taskbar on auto hide and moved all the remaining icons to the side where you can't see them unless you know what you were looking for. Needless to say a lot of people were restarting those machines and soon enough those silly underclassman stopped using our computers.
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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, back in the MS-DOS days (I am dating myself now), I changed a co-workers command prompt using the Prompt command. Basically, I made it so that his command prompt was: General Failure reading drive C: (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nore I forget the exact text now, but I made it look exactly like the old error message. I even put in the $N character combination where the drive letter went, so that no matter what drive he switched to, it would look like it had an error reading it. What was funny was when he typed, R, and it came back with: "Bad command or filename" and he still did not catch on.:laugh: Eventually he rebooted the machine (I was not cruel enough to actually change his Autoexec.bat file), and of course, it went back to normal.
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.
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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 i did was a simple batch program with a timed shutdown with the logoff switch. put it in startup with a 5second timer.. perhaps a msg saying something like "you just arnt good enough to use this PC" or similar... watch ppl pull out hair wondering why the computer would log them out just after login simple but efective :D
"There are three sides to every story. Yours, mine and the truth" ~ unknown
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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 we've all had that annoying co-worker or that really naive one. I've had the pleasure of working with both types. The naive co-worker called me one day just scared to death! Every time she would save a document change her computer would say in a darth vader sound clip "I will destroy you". I fixed it for her...while our annoying co-worker laughed at her. The annoying worker got his come-uppance, yet another co-worker took a snapshot of his desk top and made it background and then hid all of his icons under an icon he never used. He never figured out what happened to them, he "had" to use the windows menu from that point on. Next the other co-worker made a window service that would randomly cause annoying co-worker's machine to make belching or other gastronomical sounds and eject the cd-tray at the same time. Annoying co-worker would format his machine only to find it back to it antics the next morning, he finally gave up and used the machine as was. :cool:Two years later it was still like that when he was let go. - *sigh* memories.:cool:
S.Nowlin ----------------------- The journey is straight, it's the path that is twisted. Oh and did you hear? There is no spoon, only sporks.
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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.
Hahahaha I did something well funny once - while some one was away from their computer I turned it off - ahahahaha how cool and original is that - what do you mean not very?!?! Dan
At university studying Software Engineering - if i say this line to girls i find they won't talk to me Dan
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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.
ah during the summer i was working nights for a company in Dublin, one night i wrote a little C code just displaying a message saying windows suffered an error please press any key... when the user pressed a key a new message popped up requesting to reformat the machine y/n, no matter what you pressed a "reformat" started ran it on all the computers in my office alt+entered it to full screen and went home at 7am came back in at 7pm, the place was going nuts they all thought the pc's were screwed, lesson: dont hire dub ppl just because they'll work Saturdays, another favorite is to disconnect the network cable just enough to stop it working but leave it sitting in the port causes much frustration to dumb ppl! mikie
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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.
Twenty years ago, I worked at a small investment firm that was all-Mac. This was back when the Mac had the only GUI out there, and few people realized that voice and music could be digitized and played over the Mac's speaker. I happened to be the first guy on my block to get a mictophone that could record voice on the Mac. The CEO of the firm was very fond of saying to the marketing VP, "Peter, you're not listening to the market!" I put a recording of myself (with heavy reverb and my best Halloween voice) saying the same thing, and loaded it onto the VP's computer after he left one evening. I made it his default beep sound. A group of us gathered outside the closed door of his office the next morning and waited for results. It took about five minutes, but we heard him nearly come out of his chair the first time the voice came out of his computer. Then we could hear him tentatively click again, and nearly come out of his chair again. He stormed the door of his office so fast that we barely had time to get out of the way. The CEO laughed harder than any of us, and said he might just leave the computer as it was. Of course, I fixed it later that day.
David Veeneman www.veeneman.com
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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.
swap the ps2 mouse and keyboard cables at the back of the PC. Neither will work in the wrong plug. :) Another one I had to clean up after was someone locked all the 386s in my HS lab so they wouldn't boot. Old machines had a physical lock switch in the bootup that was basically useless since every machine used an identical key and came with 2 of them. Never quite figured out why someone thought that was a good idea.
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
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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.
When I was in High School I had acquired a computer case, which we filled with non-functional parts and broken monitor almost exactly like the ones used in the labs. We snuck into the lab and hid one of the brand new computers, and layed out our "sacrifice" on a table. We then waited for the ever cool and collected lab manager to round the corner to the lab. On our lookouts signal we started beating on the computer with hammers, and cutting wires at randome. The lab manager immediatly though we had destroyed a perfectly good computer and started screaming "What are you doing?!?!". The designated camera guy took a Polaroid picture, handed it to her and we all left. Last I heard the picture still hangs in her office.
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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 work for Compaq tech support. In training one day, we were instructed to mess up the machine somehow, then move to another machine and try to find and fix what somebody else did. Me and the guy on the opposite side of the table swapped monitor cables. It was hilarious because the two people working on those machines were basically trying the same things, so it took them forever to figure it out. They were so confused. I've dumped shortcuts to every file in the Windows directory in startup... I've set a screen shot of the desktop as a wallpaper and then removed all icons but My Computer... I've changed all the major file associations to other apps... I've move peoples email storage directories... I've changed the DOS prompt to strange messages... I've changed the 95/98 syslogo to things like a blue screen screen shots... I've edited wallpapers to have a wierd error message box... I've done lots of mean stuff. The computer is a great way to mess with people. But never anything that couldn't be un-done, that's just evil.
Try code model generation tools at BoneSoft.com.
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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.
We once had a really uptight prudish manager. We all worked in a big one room open office. So we decided it would be neat to pepper her sound theme with fart WAVs. That was a fun day. :laugh: Not too long ago, there was a blonde that worked in accounting that would come up to visit on occation. She was trying to quit smoking. So I wrote a little dummy app that would show progress and then display some chemical stats, and we rigged up a breathalizer looking thing to one of our machines and told her that it could detect cigarette breath so she couldn't lie to us about smoking. To this day she still thinks it was real, I think she actually quit smoking too.
Try code model generation tools at BoneSoft.com.
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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.
Back in the 80's we got a couple of cards that generated a rather robotic sounding voice from text input. I installed one in a coworker's computer and had it say something like "Help me, I'm stuck in here" when he booted. Of course no one else was ever around when it happened and he couldn't make it happen again. Just like a sitcom.