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..
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..
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.