Do you want to drive someone nuts?

[swoll1980]

Take a screener of their desktop running a app,set it as the wallpaper,let the hilarity ensue.

[chucky chuckaluck]

Take a screener of their desktop running a app,set it as the wallpaper,let the hilarity ensue.

i did that a couple of years ago. mrs. chuckaluck was not as amused as i thought she'd be.

[kaldor]

Did that to my dad a while back cause he kept nagging me not to break the computer.

Took him a whole afternoon of calling tech support to fix. He is still mad at me for it.

I am glad I did it :D

[swoll1980]

Did that to my dad a while back cause he kept nagging me not to break the computer.

Took him a whole afternoon of calling tech support to fix. He is still mad at me for it.

I am glad I did it :D

I did it to my buddy yesterday. He's still ripping his hair out, and has no clue when it comes to computers. I installed Ubuntu on his comp a few days ago, so he's blaming that. I told him I'd come by, and fix it tomorrow.

[maxpoweron]

A co-worker of mine did that years ago with Windows 98. He took a picture of the new IT guy's Desktop, saved it as his wallpaper, and disabled everything including the Taskbar. The new IT guy thought his Windows was screwed up. He spent several hours working on it and could not figure out what happened. He was already to reimage the PC.

While this was happening, I was out doing break-fix tickets for the client. I figured out what happened in no time, and the manager started to blame me for messing with the new guy. Although this is something I would do, I didn't have time to think about messing with him.

Finally the co-worker confessed. It was funny watching him get in trouble. HA! :P

[jimi_hendrix]

i did it to a friend...too bad he walked in when i was just about to set it as his background

[speedwell68]

Done that several times. It is one of the best PC related japes out there. It is even funnier if you manage to do it remotely.:D

[67GTA]

That is freakin funny! I'm going to do that, and see what my wife does when she goes to use it later.

[xpod]

Took him a whole afternoon of calling tech support to fix. He is still mad at me for it.

Those can be expensive calls if it`s to a premium rate number.:P
Changing the mouse buttons over is another good one to annoy the life out of folks....some folks anyway.

[Kingsley]

I pulled that prank a couple of times in high school. Good laughs.

Another funny thing to do is to remove and switch the commonly used keyboard keys around. It'll confuse and **** off a person if he/she isn't a touch typer.

[MaxIBoy]

I've done that before. (Handy tip, you can also disable desktop icons and shrink the taskbar until it's un-clickable.)


For greater laughs, flip the screenshot upside down. People tend to figure it out faster if you do that, though.




An even more devilish idea that I thought up just now:


Take a screenshot of the normal desktop with no programs running.
Disable the desktop icons and hide the taskbar as I mentioned before.
Instead of using a screenshot as the desktop background, use this picture:
http://www.geocities.com/kilian0072002/logon_screensaver_640.png
Then, set the screenshot as the screensaver.
Set the screensaver timeout to something short, like half a minute.

[will1911a1]

I did that to a few people at work. It was funny for a little while.

Not as funny as rotating their screen upside down though. :)

[jimi_hendrix]

I did that to a few people at work. It was funny for a little while.

Not as funny as rotating their screen upside down though. :)

how do you do that (on windows...since i have no linux friends)

[jenkinbr]

Windows XP: CTRL+ALT+<arrow key>

back to the OP's point:

Been there, done that.

To an entire Highschool computer lab :D

[Roofdaddy]

Create a Shortcut to Restarting Windows; C:\windows\rundll.exe user.exe,exitwindows

This Shortcut will shut down Windows without any Warning.


Name it something they must try ...Make your own icon ...

[jerrrys]

Take a screener of their desktop running a app,set it as the wallpaper,let the hilarity ensue.

swoll1980..you truly have a dark side..however my wife is not home right now..hummmmm

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

I work for a company where the IT department does not give anyone outside of IT admin rights. I took some screen shots of my Ubuntu desktop. I emailed them to myself at work. I then added the pictures to one of those picture screen savers. I set the screen saver to change pictures at the slowest rate. One day an IT person came to my office to install an application I had requested. When the IT person saw the Ubuntu desktop on my computer their underwear turned brown.
:lolflag:

[swoll1980]

swoll1980..you truly have a dark side

:evil:

[LouisZepher]

I went a bit further than that, on my brother's machine. I started with a screen-grab of a Run... dialogue on his desktop (so that it would match is ugly blue and pink colour scheme). Then, in Paintshop, I created a fake warning-dialogue using the original as a template, and put some dopey message (I believe I wrote something along the lines of 'MyLittlePony.trojan detected...'), then pasted this on top of a copy of his wallpaper image, put it on his system, and applied it as his wallpaper.

As an added insult, I unhooked his mouse as well. ^.^;

[swoll1980]

(I believe I wrote something along the lines of 'MyLittlePony.trojan detected...'),

Diabolical!

[init1]

On our school computers, doing a ctrl+alt+down turns the screen upside down. Not many people know how to reverse it though :D

[swoll1980]

On our school computers, doing a ctrl+alt+down turns the screen upside down. Not many people know how to reverse it though :D

I can work on an upside down screen pretty efficiently, so it wouldn't bother me to much.

[Dekkon]

I wish I could do this at the school, but everyone's settings is current to there username. :(

If I did this on the Computer in the library, then logged off, and went to the math computer lab and logged in, I'd have the exact same desktop. When another person logs in, they have there desktop.

Fun for friends though. :)

[LouisZepher]

/me just noticed Swoll's avatar.

Either I posted with the utmost perfect comedic timing, or I've just crammed my foot so far in my mouth that I've got teeth marks on my knees.

^.^;;

[xzero1]

Since its windows, you may want to make the cursor change to an hourglass for a while each time someone clicks something. Or make the computer super slow by disabling the cpu's level 2 cache.

[MikeTheC]

Reverse the mice and keyboards between two adjacent computers.

Or, for that matter, install a second mouse on a computer and then mess with that user, just occasionally moving the arrow around or randomly clicking on stuff.

Ah, good times.

[swoll1980]

Since its windows, you may want to make the cursor change to an hourglass for a while each time someone clicks something. Or make the computer super slow by disabling the cpu's level 2 cache.

Changing someones wallpaper, and messing with cpu settings are totally different. I would be very angry if someone did that. That's just me though if you have a victim that's more tolerant, it could be the way to go.

[MikeTheC]

Oh, yeah...

Years and years ago, there was a system extension for Mac OS called "MacPuke". Basically, anytime you ejected anything (floppy, ZIP, CD, etc.) you'd get this "Bwaaaaaaaah!" sound. It was great.

Also, there used to be this extension/control panel combo called "Insanity" which let you pick from several different kinds of weapons (glock, assault rifle, shotgun, etc., but also a seagull, a canon firing Bill Gates out of it, and a cow making a "meadow muffin") all with appropriate sounds. That was great for stress relief (which was the software maker's actual intent), but at a magazine I used to work for, some co-workers and I got one of our buddies real good...

There used to be (around the same time) an extension called "Oscar", which was basically a modified version of the Trash which looked and acted exactly like the genuine article *until* you emptied your trash. When you emptied your trash, Oscar The Grouch would pop up and sing, briefly, either "I like trash!" or "I like it because it's trash!". Ok, so how is this a prank? Well...

This co-worker had Oscar installed on her system, and she knew it was on some of our workstations as well. What she *didn't* know about was Insanity. So, one day, we call her over and say "Hey, check this out!" At which point, we fired up Insanity, picked the .45 (because it would produce a hole from which would issue a trickle of blood) and we shot the trash can! She was mortified and started laughing. After getting it installed on her system, we lost about 30 minutes of productivity that day, blowing the ever living s*** out of everything on our computers. It was great!

EDIT: I wish they made Insanity, Oscar and MacPuke for Linux and Mac OS X.

[kidux]

Reverse the mice and keyboards between two adjacent computers.

Or, for that matter, install a second mouse on a computer and then mess with that user, just occasionally moving the arrow around or randomly clicking on stuff.

Ah, good times.
When I worked IT my now wife was one of the end users. I would use VNC to screw with her, and then she'd call me to complain about her mouse moving on it's own or the machine doing things by itself. I'd tell her let me remote in and I'll check it out. Took her 3-4 times of that before she caught on. LOL!

[lisati]

Not as funny as rotating their screen upside down though. :)
Tried that one with Windows once("Bad_Day.exe", or some such name, came on a CD with a Computer magazine) but the effect was lost on those around me since I'm the only one who normally uses the PCs in our house...

Having a game respond with a user's name when they haven't explicity given it can sometimes cause some consternation - easy enough to do on some systems if you know what you're doing.

[LouisZepher]

Changing someones wallpaper, and messing with cpu settings are totally different. I would be very angry if someone did that. That's just me though if you have a victim that's more tolerant, it could be the way to go.
You've probably not met any sadistic geeks, then. If I shared some of the pranks my friends and I have exchanged, you hair would turn white.

[OffHand]

My colleagues once took a screenshot of someones desktop and set it as his wallpaper... it took him 3 days to call that he could not open anything on his desktop :D

Makes you wonder what some people do @ work lol

[Arkenzor]

Can you still put an html page as background in recent Windows? Back in the day of 98 I used to add annoying midi tunes to peoples' wallpapers.

[Trail]

Add "eject && eject -t" on crontab.

[jenkinbr]

Reverse the mice and keyboards between two adjacent computers.

Or, for that matter, install a second mouse on a computer and then mess with that user, just occasionally moving the arrow around or randomly clicking on stuff.

Ah, good times.

Aww, fun with VNC!

[swoll1980]

Reverse the mice and keyboards between two adjacent computers.

Or, for that matter, install a second mouse on a computer and then mess with that user, just occasionally moving the arrow around or randomly clicking on stuff.

Ah, good times.

I've done the mouse thing to my fiancée a couple of times. She hasn't cought on yet.

[Ptero-4]

(This one works if the victim is a wintendo user, knows nothing about linux and have a desktop PC with the back of the tower quite out of sight.) If you got a spare pendrive with any sort of linux in it. Try sticking it on one of the rear USB ports, change the BIOS settings to boot off the USB ports before booting the internal HD and reboot.
Watch the victim trying to get out of linux just to see it come back at the next boot, over and over again.

[swoll1980]

(This one works if the victim is a wintendo user, knows nothing about linux and have a desktop PC with the back of the tower quite out of sight.) If you got a spare pendrive with any sort of linux in it. Try sticking it on one of the rear USB ports, change the BIOS settings to boot off the USB ports before booting the internal HD and reboot.
Watch the victim trying to get out of linux just to see it come back at the next boot, over and over again.

That would be great

[DarthBrady]

I have done this, here's how to take it a step further:

goto system-->preferences-->CompizConfig Settings Manager.

Then turn on the option to show a window preview of of folders/apps minimized to the panel on the bottom of the desktop on a mouseover. Then, take a screenie with the little preview showing on a window.

Drove my buddy crazy with this one! ahh. good times.

[Firestem4]

Mwuahaha. Some of you may be interested in this little gadget. Phantom Keystroker v2 (http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/ae83/)

[Ms_Angel_D]

wow you guys are bad....lol. I remember when Napster first came out (before it was illegal) and I knew nothing about computers, I download some piece of software (don't remember exactly what it was I downloading) but I opened it and it said it was deleting my entire hd I about s**t a brick, thinking my dad is going to kill me, it being his computer and all...lol Then at the end it said gotchya!

wasn't so funny then but now I'm giggling just thinking about it...lol