Your Favourite Computer Prank

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Dairyxox

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#160588 12-Jan-2015 20:04

Hi All,

Just wondering what your favourite computer pranks are? What can you do to someones computer for a laugh.

I don't really want to hear about 'pranks' that break things, like Format C Drive Har har har. But lets try not to be judgemental.
Don't list something that would probably get you fired etc...

One of my old favourites is: CTRL + ALT + ARROW KEY (try this now)

Many display driver,s nvidia, AMD & intel can enable shortcut keys for screen rotation. Many OEM systems have these hotkeys enabled by default, and in a fraction of a second you can turn someones display upside-down or sideways etc...

The look on peoples faces when they see & try to fix this is priceless.

Another favourite is changing the desktop wallpaper to include an open window or screen damage (broken LCD image).

What are some other popular computer pranks??

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Awrrr
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#1212733 12-Jan-2015 20:20

In the good old days of MSDOS, there were some priceless joke memory-resident programs in circulation that played with the text display but did no harm. One, called Danish.com, gradually substituted typed characters with ones that created a kind of psuedo-Scandinavian alphabet. You could still read the text but it looked hilarious. Another was called Drip.com. This one caused random letters from a text to slowly slide down the screen. These tricks worked because text and graphics used to be completely distinct modes and in text mode different letters could be 'poked' into the screen memory. This did not affect the actual data, only the display. There were some priceless moments in the office when the IT expert tried to figure out what was going on.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

Jaxson

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#1212734 12-Jan-2015 20:22

Changed the screen save to the blue screen of death, with a 5m time delay.

Simple but amusingly effective over and over again.

macuser

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#1212736 12-Jan-2015 20:24

Starting a political thread on geekzone

josephhinvest

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#1212742 12-Jan-2015 20:48

I remember a little mac app that would make a squeaky toy sound when the mouse button was pressed.
We would also ssh into cow-orkers machines and make them speak etc.
and the classics, screenshot of desktop set as wallpaper with all icons removed from desktop.
Piece of Sellotape over optical mouse sensor, or in the good old days, remove the mouse ball

Cheers,
Joseph

Behodar

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#1212751 12-Jan-2015 21:04

Jaxson: Changed the screen save to the blue screen of death, with a 5m time delay.

Simple but amusingly effective over and over again.

One of the guys at work had one that would pop up with a BSOD for a couple of seconds, then a black screen, then the Windows XP logo (with animated bar), followed by the "welcome" image and a desktop with a couple of apps... then it'd loop back to the BSOD again.

josephhinvest: Piece of Sellotape over optical mouse sensor, or in the good old days, remove the mouse ball

Pranked a coworker with the same model of wireless mouse that I had. I swapped mice and naturally he couldn't get it to go. He changed the batteries, still no luck. Meanwhile I had the real mouse in my pocket and I put my finger over the sensor to make his mouse pointer move on its own while he wasn't touching his. It took him a while to figure out what was happening :P

xpd

Geek @ Coastguard NZ
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#1212753 12-Jan-2015 21:07

1) NSFW but hell funny at LAN's..... wait for someone to go for food run, and leaves their PC unlocked (or use the password if you know it), edit registry to run video of your choice full screen every time they login - pr0n works well :-p

2) Screenshot their desktop and set the result as their wallpaper - remove all real icons to a folder. Takes most average users a while to figure the icons are part of the image....

3) Fun at LAN if you want to know someones password who sits opposite you, wait until said person takes a break, plug their keyboard into your PC, and yours into theirs and open notepad on your PC - need timing for this - upon their return, when they hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, you hit it so it appears theyve unlocked their PC, then they type their password into your notepad ;)

4) Again LAN fun, scan LAN for shared installed game folders with full permissions..... get the owner to start a server for that game. Leave them to play for a while with others, then start moving files from the shared folder for that game. Time how long and how many files you remove before the game craps out and user starts abusing their PC.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

LinkTree

reven

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#1212754 12-Jan-2015 21:10

The guys at work once plugged in a second mouse with a long usb cable into my computer, my mouse started "randomly" moving (this was after my CPU was upgraded), 7 years later and it was brought up again at work the other day. ill never live that down.

Quic Broadband

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Dairyxox

1594 posts

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#1213019 13-Jan-2015 10:22

Excellent. I'll have to get some longer USB extensions
Remind me not to go to a LAN with xpd

One time I compiled a simple command line app that generated random error messages and renamed it to my friends favourite game exec. Mean

corksta

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#1213045 13-Jan-2015 10:34

Auto Replace in MS Word is always a good one.

trig42

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#1213056 13-Jan-2015 10:55

Swap the M and N keys on the keyboard.
I have been called out to a job where someone had had this done to them. Much hilarity on the phone in the background while he was on the phone to me booking the job.

meesham

973 posts

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#1213072 13-Jan-2015 11:26

I worked for a reasonably sized company about 12 years ago who had a small software development team that I was part of. Us and the support team worked in an area together and most of us listened to music (with headphones) through our computer. One of the other programmers got bored one day so he wrote a little background service that played sounds that he could control remotely which he installed using a domain admin account. I was listening to music one day while coding and then all of a sudden Arnold Schwarzenegger started saying stuff to me through my headphones, it took us all a while to figure out who was responsible. Things escalated from there and it got to the point where we'd be constantly be watching procmon to make sure other people weren't messing with our computers.

He also wrote a little module in the main in-house developed CRM that allowed him to open up webpages in the user's default browser remotely, so he'd do stuff like open up the Cosmo magazine website on guys' computers while they're at lunch.

MikeB4

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#1213076 13-Jan-2015 11:32

Just moving a few of the physical keys on the keyboard or changing some of the Keyboard mappings

BTR

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#1213087 13-Jan-2015 11:49

Logging into a co workers mac via SSH and shutting down the GUI. Tape over the optical sensor on the mouse or plugging in a faulty keyboard.

I remember in one office I forwarded a PPT with a misleading name I was sent to someone and told them to turn their volume up before opening it as it was quiet. 2 minutes later his computer was blaring out "I am looking at gay pron" over and over. Everyone had a good laugh in the office that day.

TLD

902 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1213107 13-Jan-2015 12:39

corksta: Auto Replace in MS Word is always a good one.

Bugger. You beat me to it. We did this to a senior engineer's computer in the lab I worked at. Every time he typed his name, it was replaced with Ugly Fat b@st@rd.

Edit shortcut targets via their Properties to open NSFW apps

Upload some choice wav files and set them as Windows system sounds. I wouldn't be surprised if entire sound themes available for DL.

There used to be a couple of Windows screen savers that displayed a text message, but I think 3D text is the only one that ships nowadays, but you can still set that up with embarrassing text.

We had about 50 engineers working in our lab and there was always someone up to mischief. I think I mentioned my favourite here before, but we rigged up a car windscreen washer behind the wall mounted telephone which had a sound booth thingie around it. The cable ran up the wall, across the suspended ceiling tiles, and down a conduit to my work bench. You'd be amazed at how wet that jet could make someone before they had time to react.

One that, thinking back, I am amazed we didn't get into real trouble for, involved an engineer who liked to write 'Dead Meat' on your stuff with a felt tip. So one late shift we took the top off the engraving machine; clamped it to his laminated topped bench, and engraved DEAD MEAT in four inch high letters. We'd not long had new worktops on the benches, and the boss was seriously unamused.

Actually, another that might beat the screen washer prank was when we got our first white board. The above mentioned boss thought this would be handy for people to make themselves available if they had slack time, but that never happened. The first thing to go up on it was a joke.

Q) Whats the difference between (bosses name) and a bucket of poo?
A) The bucket.

But this eventually evolved to a trick where something mildly insulting was written in a combination of dry marker, and permanent marker, so that when the victim tried to rub it out, only the dry marker text would be removed leaving something _much_ worse. One that comes to mind is:

The (boss's name) is a country gentleman.

I'll let you work it out

Note: I had put where this all happened in this post, but after thinking about it, I just went and erased it! :-(

Trevor Dennis
Rapaura (near Blenheim)

hio77

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Lizard Networks

#1213114 13-Jan-2015 12:50

xpd: 1) NSFW but hell funny at LAN's..... wait for someone to go for food run, and leaves their PC unlocked (or use the password if you know it), edit registry to run video of your choice full screen every time they login - pr0n works well :-p

2) Screenshot their desktop and set the result as their wallpaper - remove all real icons to a folder. Takes most average users a while to figure the icons are part of the image....

3) Fun at LAN if you want to know someones password who sits opposite you, wait until said person takes a break, plug their keyboard into your PC, and yours into theirs and open notepad on your PC - need timing for this - upon their return, when they hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, you hit it so it appears theyve unlocked their PC, then they type their password into your notepad ;)

4) Again LAN fun, scan LAN for shared installed game folders with full permissions..... get the owner to start a server for that game. Leave them to play for a while with others, then start moving files from the shared folder for that game. Time how long and how many files you remove before the game craps out and user starts abusing their PC.

i was a little tentative to bring up things done at lans, but this pushed me to share..

backgrounds was always a good one, toggling the NoDispScrSavPage registry key was always good to carry on the laugh a bit more. Porn was too far, had a friend who put all his expertise in paint into drawing the perfect picture to be funny but not at "NSFW" stage.

There was another very memorable lan, friend left the lan for another party and so we sort out a bit of trollish fun. Weeks later he was still uncovering things that would have odd sounds, or not quite work as they should - Thats the last time im manually editing the registry to enable the administrator account with no password though, doing it over a CLI wasnt the most, reassuring way to achieve it!

many more pranks propped up for us, however they tend to reach outside of the 'computer' world a bit.

#include <std_disclaimer>

Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

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