I have been planning to write a post about computer pranks for some time now. And I spent the last whole week trying to find out some crazy and awesome computer pranks. Now I finally have some time to share it with you guys and I have found the top 7 pranks which were the best according to me. And lastly I am writing this as a guest blogger to a blog I love because this way more people will be able to get to know about this (my blog is quite new).
You can try these on your friends and I am sure they won’t be able to sleep that night. So read on to find some great computer pranks..
<credit>
1. Freeze Desktop Icons
What this will do is make your desktop icons unusable. That means that the icons will be visible but nothing will happen when you click on them. To do this follow these steps:
- First go to your desktop (click on show the desktop), now press Prt Scrn button on your keyboard, this will take a screen shot of your desktop.
- Now just go to paint, go to edit-> paste and then finally save it as a .bmp file.
- Then right click on any open area on the desktop and click on arrange icons by and then click on show desktop icons. This will hide all your desktop icons.
- After that just open the screenshot you saved in paint and set it as the desktop background.
2. ShutDown Virus
This one is pretty popular. Please note that this is not an actual virus. Its just to prank your friends and won’t harm their computer. Now to do this just right click on your desktop. Click on new and then shortcut, a new shortcut dialog box will appear. In this box type
“Shutdown -s -t -c 60 “Your Pc Is Infected”
What this will do is that, it will display a message that your pc is infected and will start a 60 sec timer after which your computer will shutdown. To make it a better impact just rename it to something common like mozilla firefox. Change its icon to resemble firefox icon by going to the properties and then change icon. You can also copy it in the windows startup folder so that it is executed everytime your computer is booted. To do that go to start, all programs, startup and paste it there..
To close this shutdown virus anytime go to run and type
“Shutdown -a”
This will abort the shutdown. Then you can delete this if you want..
3. Replace Keyboard Keys
Woudn’t it be amazing if you can change your friends keyboard keys so that when they press any key like ‘s’ some other key is displayed like ‘x’. I am sure you will totally freak him out. Here are the steps to do this..
- Download this program called Replace Keys.
- Open it and then in the program that appears you can replace any key to some other key
- Just click on add and choose the keys you want to replace.
- Once done just click on write to registry.
To undo this just open that program again, delete the key and click on write to registry.
4. Clippy
This one is by far the funniest prank I have ever seen. You must be familiar with clippy if you use windows, in microsoft word, while searching for something ? It just pops out to help us by providing some tips. Now just download this program from here, open it and wait a minute. After every minute the clippy will automatically popup no matter what you are doing and display some seriously stupid messages.
These include messages like “YOUR MONITOR IS OPERATIONAL” etc. A perfect way to make your friends go crazy. To stop this move your mouse to the top left corner.
5. Screw Screen Colors
What it does is as the name suggests, screw your screen colors to look something like this. This is the limit of how real a computer prank can get. Your friends will be totally scared when they see this. Just download the software from here and open it.
To close this just move your cursor to the top left corner of the screen. If that doesnt work just go to the task manager and end the process named Screenscrew.exe
And of course you can paste it in the startup folder or make some other shortcut on your friend’s desktop to point to it.
6. Disco lights
This one requires a little bit of coding, but believe me its really easy. Just create a new text document and type this in the notepad..
Set wshShell=wscript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
do
wscript.sleep 100
wshshell.sendkeys”{CAPSLOCK}”
wshshell.sendkeys”{NUMLOCK}”
wshshell.sendkeys”{SCROLLLOCK}”
loop
After that go to file, save as then use any name but make sure that it ends with the extension “.vbs” (for example: prank.vbs). And be sure to select all files in the file types.
If you do understand some of it you can see that it sends the keys Caps lock, Num lock and Scroll lock and then waits for 100ms. Now when you run this you will see that your computer lights are getting on and off just like disco lights 😀
To stop this go task manager and end the process wscript.exe. Copy it in the startup folder to get better reaction..
7. Never ending Pop-ups
Again we will use a vbs script to do this. Open notepad and type the following code in it:
msgbox “Virus Found”
msgbox “Press ok To Remove It”
msgbox “Can’t remove the virus. Press ok to format the drive”
do
msgbox “Formatting”
loop
You may have understood by now that whatever you type in the msgbox it appears in a new message box and the msgbox between do and loop is executed infinetly.
To close the message box go to task manager and end the process “wscript.exe”
So have fun pranking your friends. These work in all versions of windows. And ya please post your opinions whether you liked these tricks or not. If you know of some other such pranks mention them too. I would love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading..
7 Awesome Computer Pranks,Karan runs a technology blog, Digital World, where he writes about computer tips and tricks. In his blog he tries to write content which the average user finds interesting and useful.
Vinayak
Jul 31. 2011
hahaha…. that’s really informative post… thanks buddy…!!!!
TechCrates
Jul 31. 2011
Thanks to Karan for contributing this post …
karan
Jul 31. 2011
:O thanks for publishing my post salman. I am really excited about this one:D
Praveen
Jul 31. 2011
That’s cool and fun! Thanks for sharing it 🙂
TechCrates
Aug 01. 2011
Thanks to Karan for the great post ….
shashank chinchli
Aug 01. 2011
Played pranks a lot with this small commands and terrorised many friends during high school days!I never used to understand what codes were and always used to play first on myself!!
Akhil
Aug 01. 2011
Its a really good share. will try dis.
Business logo design
Aug 01. 2011
Your post have the information that is helpful and very informative. I would like you to keep up the good work.Thanks for sharing.
fazal mayar
Aug 02. 2011
those are pretty funny pranks that we should all try. I think i will try the fake keyboard keys 😀
TechCrates
Aug 02. 2011
Good to know that …
karan
Aug 02. 2011
thanks@ vinayak, praveen, shashank, akhil, ‘business logo’ and fazal for your awesome comments:D
Great to see you guys here and i am really happy that you liked the pranks. Tc..
Atish
Aug 02. 2011
Super cool pranks. thanks dude. I just loved them
TechCrates
Aug 02. 2011
Good to know that ….
Martin
Aug 02. 2011
I can imagine the look on my friends’ faces. I admit these pranks are funny yet scary. You provided useful information in a way I can also be prepared in case someone pulls these pranks on me.
Ikenna
Aug 02. 2011
Lol! These are really funny pranks. I’ll the one on virus on my crazy friend. I’ll love to see the look on his face.
Will be tweeting..
TechCrates
Aug 02. 2011
Sure … do share what happens !!
Maninder
Aug 02. 2011
Nice pranks. I have tried the shutdown thing already but some of these are quite new. Thanks for sharing this.
Olawale Daniel
Aug 03. 2011
Thanks Karan for the information that you just shared here. top computer’s pranks..Thanks 🙂
karan
Aug 03. 2011
thanks olawale bro:)
android phones review
Aug 03. 2011
really funny and interesting, a difference topic so get a punk
karan
Aug 03. 2011
glad you enjoyed it. And ya sometimes its better to go a bit off topic and write about things that people may enjoy:D
Priyangshu
Aug 04. 2011
Nice post Karan !!! Funny & Interesting !!!
plaban
Aug 09. 2011
Nice Pranks, I’ll try some of these on my friends pc.
rakesh
Aug 16. 2011
nice pranks, Thanks for posting them here
TechCrates
Aug 16. 2011
Thanks for stopping by and commenting 🙂
Sandipan Mukherjee
Sep 12. 2011
Computer can even talk with the help of VB Script.
Very informative and nice article. Thanks for sharing.
Ana
Oct 01. 2011
I have all my work on this computer and if somebody pulled those frozen icons on me I think I’d just freak out!
I love the Clippy thing! I think I’d smash my computer myself 😀
hifu prostate cancer
Oct 15. 2011
Shutdown Virus seems like the best prank among the list. I can’t wait to see the look of my friend’s face.
prabhat
Mar 18. 2012
HI ADMIN…
i’ve tried many of the tips you mentioned here..and they all work perfectly..
and making a virus is really and undoubtedly my favorite one..
because once i made the virus (i mean the popup windows trick)in my friend’s computer and he thought that its a virus…and i couldn’t stop myself from laughing..
nice pranks…keep it up
TechCrates
Mar 18. 2012
That’s really great … Thanks for your comment
Richmond
Mar 18. 2012
lol…these are some super cool pranks here, thanks for sharing man, i liked the first one best, just tried it on one of my friends lappi, waiting for him to come back to work. thanks again! 😀
TechCrates
Mar 18. 2012
Thanks for your comment …
sham
Mar 19. 2012
That’s a nice list buddy. Love pranks like these. I actually have a separate category just for pranks in my old blog. Some of them went viral too 🙂
TechCrates
Mar 19. 2012
Thanks for stopping by and commenting Sham 😉
Puneet
Mar 19. 2012
The best one is disco light. Superb. By the way I have already tried all except this disco light. Now I enjoyed this very much. thanks for sharing few cool pranks here.
TechCrates
Mar 19. 2012
You’re most welcome ….
Puneet
Mar 21. 2012
Hey Buddy, I would love to see a list of internet pranks too. Please write a post for that too. I will be waiting for this post.
TechCrates
Mar 21. 2012
Let me think about that ….
septem
Mar 19. 2012
these post have the information that is helpful and very informative to us . I would like you to keep up the good work.Thanks for sharing and i will follow these blog everytime you put new blog in here .
Atish
Mar 19. 2012
Tried all these pranks already. nice share dude. I loved the shutdown prank. its nice.
TechCrates
Mar 20. 2012
🙂
marco
Mar 20. 2012
very funny, I used some on my girlfriends laptop, I can’t wait for the storys she has to telle me about todays work 😀
Damien
Mar 20. 2012
I did this pranks back in school. I once1 changed the color scheme of the desktop and change the locations of the keys in the keyboard, much to the anger of my teacher.
TechCrates
Mar 20. 2012
You made me recollect those olden but golden days …
Dan
Mar 21. 2012
very cool pranks. I will share this with my 13 year old son, we wants to be a hacker (ethical of course) so we will love this.
TechCrates
Mar 21. 2012
That’s great Dan …
Prakash
Mar 21. 2012
nice computer pranks…..i enjoyed all of these……
thanks for sharing it………….
TechCrates
Mar 21. 2012
You’re welcome …
Shri
Jul 14. 2014
I admit these pranks are funny yet scary. You provided useful information in a way I can also be prepared in case someone pulls these pranks on me.