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.
I actually play pranks like that all the time. I took a screenshot of a coworkers desktop, turned it upside down then set it as his desktop background. The finishing touch was to then hide his icons and taskbar. I changed another coworkers graphics driver settings to turn his screen a nice shade of purple. Then after he had finally figured it out, I played with his monitor cord till I got the same shade of purple. He was sure I had done the same thing, and couldn't figure out why he couldn't fix it the same way. I also wrote a simple program that creates an image of a smiley whenever you click anywhere on the screen. The smiley then bounces around the screen. It is impossible to close without a ctrl-alt-del, so less computer literate users soon end up with a screen full of bouncing smileys. I then took the liberty of putting the exe in everyones startup. Much fun was had by all. When Cthulhu Calls, he calls 1-800-Collect.
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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 discovered a registry hack in WinNT which allows you to re-map keyboard keys. For April Fools day, I swapped a colleague's "N" & "M" keys in the registry, then popped out the physical keys on his keyboard and swapped them round. Being a touch-typer, he kept typing the wrong keys, but when he looked at the keyboard it looked like the keys were correct. He thought he was going dyslexic.
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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.
Maybe 10 years ago now (showing my age) - I was evaluating MS Systems Management Server for the company I worked for. I discovered the remote desktop assistance feature. ;) Cut a long story short - I installed the client on a machine in the office next door while everyone was at lunch. When they came back from lunch I sat in my office randomly taking control of the mouse and opening/closing applications on the desktop. I could hear lots of discussion about a possible virus until I opened Notepad and type "No virus - it's me!". I just about escaped with my life that day.
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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.
Back when DOS 2.0 was released I worked in a ComputerLand store to support the sales team (technically). I learned how to use the DOS debug editor to modify error messages in COMMAND.COM. So instead of displaying "Invalid DOS command" at the C prompt, DOS would display my replacement strings, like "Try again stupid". Since sales people rarely typed DOS commands correctly, I could count on a good laugh. One day I (ok I was young at the time) used replacement strings that included a bit of profanity, which were discovered by a sales person giving a demo to a customer. I found other ways to amuse myself after that.
John Ward
I never make the same mistake twice...I'm too busy making new ones!
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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 did this desktop trick too, only with an error message on it. Swapping cables between 2 colleagues' monitors can be fun too. My favourite though is when I changed a boot.ini to require a selection between some funny/non-existing OSes.
--------------- don't P A N I C
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A somewhat related hack, I piped a random file into the sound card device on my friends linux box, nice modem dialup ish sound for a couple minutes.
Once upon a job, I changed the script we used to check in source code changes so that it executed a sound file that was a toilet flushing. Needless to say at certain points in our development lifecycle you could hear the sound of frequently flushing toilets from various cubicles. :-D
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Once upon a job, I changed the script we used to check in source code changes so that it executed a sound file that was a toilet flushing. Needless to say at certain points in our development lifecycle you could hear the sound of frequently flushing toilets from various cubicles. :-D
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A somewhat related hack, I piped a random file into the sound card device on my friends linux box, nice modem dialup ish sound for a couple minutes.
The screenshot of someone's desktop is a favourite of mine, although I prefer to then lock the PC and move the login dialogue off the screen. When your victim returns they can see their screen, but for some reason can't click on any of their icons... I worked with a guy who thought it was funny to send 100 alerts to his victim so that they would have to click OK 100 times. It was really rather boring but he would insist upon doing it. Anyhow, one time he left his machine unlocked, so I left a macro on his machine so that several autocorrects would be set every time he started his machine. Most of them were fairly obvious, such as "the" to "I blow goats" but changing "team" to "twat" proved to be particularly funny. Naturally enough my victim spotted the problem fairly quickly and knew how to reset all the autocorrects whilst giving it, "You'll have to do better than that to catch me out." It was all I could do to stop myself laughing there and then, but his expression a few hours later when they had all returned was priceless. The macro remained there for a couple of weeks until he failed to proof read an email properly, and referred to the Infrastructure Twat in an email to his team. They all found this hilariously funny, though I was told to change it back. The joke had run it's course... Vincent http://www.pub-olympics.com
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Related trick I read about. This was back when you could use ANSI to change key assignments. Swap the M and N key caps on the target's PC. Swap the M and N key assignments and watch the touch typist go crazy trying to figure it out. Lilith
I did something similar to a collegue's PC - swapped the H and G keys over. Unfortunately he was off sick and I had to use his PC. My password consisted of an H and a G. Spent ages trying to work out why my password wouldn't work :doh: Vincent http://www.pub-olympics.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 Win 3.11 days, I made a little gadget that turned the screen image upside down, and could only be shut down by hitting an obscure key combination or with the three-finger salute. One non-techie I "field tested" it on refused to stoop to asking ask me how to get rid of it, and turned his monitor upside down (which, unexpectedly, made it smell funny).
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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.
Years ago, a Melbourne university set up one of its very first PC labs. Some of us discovered that you could FTP anonymously to a PC while someone was using it. We didn't steal stuff or anything, but we would access A:. Most often than not the students didn't have a floppy in A: which would cause the message "Abort, Retry, Ignore" (or something like that). We would be looking across the room trying not to LOL to much, while they would scratch their head, trying to figure out what went wrong.
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Once upon a job, I changed the script we used to check in source code changes so that it executed a sound file that was a toilet flushing. Needless to say at certain points in our development lifecycle you could hear the sound of frequently flushing toilets from various cubicles. :-D
This incident happened when i was in college, 2nd year. we were in unix lab, and there was a dumbo guy in our batch. he came late to the lab and couldnt find any system free. so we persuaded him to occupy a Server machine. Poor chap , he didnt know wat a server machine was supposed to do and he started working on it. Later when the admin guys came over there, he got a nice scolding from them :laugh:
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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?
That only works if you have the drivers for an Intel integrated video card. It can be changed by clicking the Intel systray icon and going to screen rotation. It's also possible with nVidia, but I don't think they have a keyboard shortcut for it by default.