Need some good Windows pranks

T

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[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 7, 2002
Messages
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It's a slow day at work and we're in the mood to screw with one of our fellow techs. What I need are some good harmless pranks to play on his computer. Yesterday I did the oldest one in the book (Screenshot as wallpaper, hid the icons, watched him double-click icons that weren't really icons) and it drove him nuts before we let him off the hook. This morning I switched around a few of his shortcuts so that the Opera icon opens media player and vice-versa... I'm not looking for the programs that open CD trays or flip the screen, we harassed him with those a couple of months ago. What we're looking for are ones that cause no harm but let us laugh at his (lack of) diagnostic skills. :D

*EDIT* Whoops, this is for Win2k
 
Man, there used to be a program called "upsdn.exe" that inverted the whole screen. You'd put it in the startup folder, and it would always finish booting with the desktop upside down. The first mouse click, and it would end the program, and everything went back to normal. I have no idea if it would run under XP (these were the dark days of '98), but it was a riot. Google for it, or something like it...sorry I couldn't be more help!
 
If he has an nvidia card you can just use the driver to flip the screen upside down, sideways, etc. Sure he might be smart enough to figure it out, but if he doesn't know about the setting he can look everywhere and not find any program causing it (because its the driver, kapeesh?).
 
How evil do you want to be?

Evil:
Enter BIOS, disable L1 Cache on CPU. enjoy 486 speeds...

Scotch tape select pins on their network cable. If done correctly, the lights will still come up, but you will not get traffic.

edit the host file to make common sites like google.com point... elsewhere wuhahaha

Mild:
Put scotch tape over his mouse (if it's IR), or remove the mouse ball.

Set their monitor to 60htz

Setup a wireless mouse, for you of couse...
 
i was watching an ep of the screen savers a while back and they had this prank where you put some sort of substance through the grills on top of their monitor, and when u turn on teh monitor it would cause a reaction due to the heat and smoke would come out so it would look as if his monitor was smoking and on fire.
 
Heh, that'd be great until they grab the extinguisher and blow it into the top. Hide the extinguisher and any nearby beverages before you do that. ;)
 
The desktop as wallpaper is by far the best. Is the guy a total idiot? If so, just setup his mouse for lefthanded users. I did that to a total computer moron. He went off the wall that his mouse didn't work. ;)
 
I forgot about screwing with the mouse. I just changed his mouse to left-handed, cranked the double-click speed to the max, and changed the speed slider to the max with max acceleration. I also changed the keyboard layout to dvorak. :p He's freaking out already.
 
if you have a network printer log into the network printer and ban his ip address

then unban

then ban

then unban

watch him squirm and blame bill gates.... yeah a couple of months ago i had fun doing this to a mac fanatic at work.... he is one of those ultra mac fans that wants bill gates dead.
 
get into the registry and set the shell as telnet.exe or notepad.exe
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon


Edit: a knowledgeable person will know how to get explorer back
 
heres a good one for a lan, maybe not for work tho. my friend left the room and didnt lock his computer (that was back when if you didnt lock it you were asking for it), so we created a new account on his computer, logged in to it and locked his computer...he had to restart, login, and delete it

almost used this on my roommate when he was pissing me off, http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=331, works really well if you put it in startup, holding shift while login cancels startup items
 
I think it would be funny to name it identically (and give it the same icon as) a commonly used icon on his desktop, removing the original. Then, whenever he goes to run "internet explorer" for example, his computer would reboot! :D
 
what was that webpage that shows a fake virus eating away all your files? then it goes back to normal after a few min?????? anyone got a linky?
 
There is a screensaver that simulates a bsod then restarts the computer (Not really). If I find a link I will post it. There is even one that starts installing Linux... :D
 
If the guy doesn't know how to type and needs to look at the keyboard, re-arrange a few of his keys. I did that to a guy I worked with once. He was a pecker, you know pecks at the keyboard with two fingers. I re-arranged three keys on the keyboard, and it took him a couple of days to figure it out.

Another one I did to a friend, but it takes time. Right click the desktop, go to the appearance tab, select advanced, then increase the size of the caption buttons by one each day. It's so gradual it takes a while to realize that those buttons are geting bigger.
 
Some ones I've done:

switch M and N, hardly noticable
or just spell out something on their keyboard heheh

screen shot of the desktop as the background and hide the icons.

switch mouse buttons AND orientation (turn the mouse sideways and do that wizard)
 
I have done some good ones in my days, I found that someone had did a print screen or the blue screens of death and made them as screen savers. So I put a few on a friends computers and set the screensaver to show up within 2minutes. They wined and cried saying their computer was broken, so I disabled the screen saver and they asked "how did you fix the computer. I like my friends even though they live in Kentucky.

Or that a friend of mine distracted me to got outside for a few minutes, while his other friend programmed all the computers in the lab to show some obseen message show on all the screens like the matrix.
 
Remap keys, or change the key buttons on their keyboard...
 
I had a guy in tech school, that wanted a copy of some software I had. I didn't really like him, but I got tired of him asking me for it. So, I finally gave him a copy, except, instead of the software, I wrote a script that copied itself into the system directory named something like sysexpl.exe, then put an entry in the run and runonce directories of the registry, and after doing all of this, waited 5 minutes, and forced all applications closed and restarted. I took a screenshot of the autoplay screen of the software he wanted, changed the Install button to run my script and close the window.

Turns out it was worse than I thought. He was so excited that he got the software, he wanted to test it out before he got home. He tried it on 8 computers at work before giving up that it wouldn't work. Two weeks later he was asking people in class if they had ever seen this problem that his machine just keeps shutting off after a little bit of time.
 
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