Best pc pranks

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
We had this guy named Rob at work who was just a little teensy bit vain (Ok a whole lot vain). He took everything about himself seriously and would freeek at the smallest things...

When he would go to lunch I would log onto his computer (don't ask how) and put up a Marque screen saver that said some very choice/targeted phrases about his ummmm appearance... I would then change his password and allow the screensaver to kick in...

When he got back he was always ticked off... When he went down the hall in frustration to get the IT guys to fix it I would quickly log back in and return everything back to normal and kick the screensaver back in...

When they got there "nothing"... he could log in and everything "hmmmm"

Everyone in the office knew it was me but nobody said anything becuase the guy was such a jerk and they were entertained as well...
 
And from the other thread,

Two stories somewhat linked....

A bunch of friends were having a gross "GIF" contest which got pretty bad (when Internet search engines first hit PCs). In fact one guy emailed us all a GIF that ended the contest in one fail swoop "man it was bad... Shocked Shocked Shocked ". We all came into work that evening and immediately declared him the winner.

Months later while at work, I had a friend that was a prankster and he got my log-in ID and password. He put a "how you say" pinup as my wallpaper. I managed to turn the screen off just in time before the female colleague that was with me turned her head. /me "why don't we go to your PC to work on this"... He saw her there and just about lost it because he was freaking out about her seeing it..

It took a few weeks "he was guarding very well" but I finally got his login "using the same female colleague Wink". After I got the login I replaced his wallpaper with the above mentioned winner of the gross GIF contest. When he came back from lunch and logged in "I" was immediately declared the winner Wink. Needless to say "he" nor "I" did that again..

Come to think of it I should have retained that GIF for future use but I got rid of it right after that...
 
For those of you who have not yet disabled your guest account...

Using the guest account you can do a little something called remote desktop in WinXP Pro....

This is handy knowledge at a Lan Party since we all know what the IP address range is... 😉

I guarantee you someone at your Lan party will be running XP Pro with the guest account and remote desktop enabled...

There are a number of ways to play with this one :)

Problem is they typically know you are there since it puts a large almost banner like thing at the top.. So work quickly :)

This is especially effective with the person away from their computer...

Might even get away with it for several gaming nights :)

Edited to add the fact that in the programs tab you can add which proggy you would like to run at login...
 
I convinced my mom that files were stored in the monitor, and then Id disconnect the monitor and shed freak even though i would just reconnect it and everything would be fine.

my dad thought it was hilarious.
-cm
 
Did your mom use "white out" on the screen too?

J/K!!

My mom would have done the same... Freaked out about the files that is "not the white out thing" :)
 
Not so much of a prank but more like an annoyance...

I had a Captain that was developing an app for the AirForce... For it to pass muster to be used in our squadron he had to secure the login/password info.

Knowing I was the squadron geek he brought it to me several times to break into... (kinda funny since I was a Senior Airman at the time)...

The first 5 or 6 times I came back to him in less than five minutes with the machine logged into the ADMIN account of his application...

He was furious.... He could not figure out how I was doing it...

Can you say PC Tools Gold Edition?? I did a tree search/sort for the newest file on the system (hidden or not)... Then opened his file using the edit tool. What is nice about the edit tool for PC Tools is that in one fail swoop you could easily convert the contents of that file from any format (HEX in this case) to ASCII or back...

At first he had thought that it was good enough to hide the file using permissions 8O 8O :roll: :roll: 8O 8O .. Then hide the file and convert to Hex 8O 8O :roll: :roll: 8O 8O.. Then hide the file and convert to Binary :roll: :roll: ...

Then in his final attempt I just plain told him that he was going to have to use real encryption because it was just no fun anymore :) He tried to do an ASCII+1 encryption and then convert to binary and hide the file.... :roll: :roll: Simple use of the ASCII table and I was in.. It did take me a few minutes more to figure this one out but I started to see the trend almost right away... Like playing a cryptoquip from the newspaper :)

He finally implemented a real encryption method and I was unable to break that... I only tried for a couple hours... He was happy enough with that...
 
ok i just remember some more pranks i did on the computers at school. The computer had barely any security so it was easy to do anything on them. I changed all the bios passwords and i also made it so you needed the password to use the computer on some of them. Me and my friends would also always send /netsends all the time and it would be on every computer in the whole school. We wrote some pretty funny stuff until they disabled it.

oh and this one time the computers at school were these cheap macs that would always freeze for around 30 seconds. So i printed out a bunch of signs that said macs suck and put them all over the computers and a few on the walls. The teacher took the ones on the computers off but he left the ones that were on the walls for months (someone probably made him take it down).
 
i've heard of a little program that people think is a game or any .exe file...but when they go to use it all it does is open the disk drive on their computer 😀
 
My high school had some lame shitty log in program for all the computers in the school, and when you would log off it would count down from 10 and the computer became locked until that point. Well some people found out that if you hit a certain button (don't remember what it was) at like three seconds left or something, the timer would go to like 9832741029 seconds, literally weeks worth of time. The only way to get it out of that was to just kill the power.
 
In high school we used to have a thing on the network called "WinPopUp" that the network admins supposedly "deleted" but all you had to do was search for the .exe and run it. I found in one of the files where you could change the "Source PC-AutoDetect1" to 0 and enter your own Source PC name. The source pc was the name of the pc that came up on the top of the messege saying "From PC 0xx0" and all the PC's in the school had a "node" number on top. We would simply find the kid whom we did not like, and see what PC he was sitting at, and send a systemwide messege of something obscene and naturally a teacher or 12 would see it and call the dean or library to see which kid was sitting there and he/she would get taken to the office lol.

Someone eventually found out me and a couple guys were changing the files and removed WinPopUp completely. It was hilarious while it lasted.
 
LOL Where do i start

Win98 days... Autoexec.bat, put a line to exe 'restart.bat' 😛 took the 'IT' guy " our skool a month to figure it out.

Remove HDD's

Bend the metal flaps of floppys back, so they get ripped off in the drive when ppl pull the disk out.

Got into BIOS (skool) and rigged a P2 so it took 12minutes to load 98

Backdoor entry 98 put porn as teachers desktop
Take control of pc, and type on stoopid kids pc's "Hello, i am your computer, im here to help you complete your IS assignment"... "Oh so you're fucking ignoring me now?"... "Fine... fuck you" Then start deleting text.

Tell the new kid to use the router pc... when it doesnt work tell him to reset.... network goes down.

Magnets + monitors... nuff said

Screen copy, minimise task bar... wallpaper... weve all done it

Swap 2 keys on KB

Jeeperz... the list goes on.

In our final year of skool (12) we fucked up soo many pc's sooo badly, the head of IT (our teacher) had to have a junior teacher supervise him... he took early retirement after 3 months of that. Little bastards huh.

U can tell why i didnt do IT at Uni
 
Ok here is my entry...

I worked with a guy who was really proud of his boat. It was a bay boat around 28 feet and pretty nice. He put it on his PC as wallpaper so he could admire it all day. Since I was on night shift and he left his PC on, I copied off his boat picture and re-worked it in Photoshop. I had a picture of me in a cool hat and shrunk it down to make me appear to be standing on his deck. With a little shading it looked pretty real. The next day my associates were watching when he sat down. They started to roll laughing when he was squinting to focus on who was on his boat. He was a good sport about it.

But the funniest one was when he did it again. This time with his hot rod Dodge Dart. He had it all tricked out with nice wheels, a hood scoop and nice paint. So I went to work that night again with Photoshop. I put cracks in his windows. Erased his hood scoop. Removed the wheels, put them horizontal and put the car on them like in a junkyard. Pulled out the headlights and had them dangling on the wires. Again in the morning he sits at his desk and co-workers howled when he got this sick look on his face while he wondered who trashed his car. Ohhhhh too funny !!!
 
This is evil....

I had a programming class with some downsyndrome kids... they were in the class for typist class.

One of them... 6' tall brute... always had to press <RETURN> if an error came on the screen...

So a friend of mine made a simple program that popped an error onto the screen and everytime the poor bastard hit return it would pause for a moment and pop back up.

The poor bastard lost his marbles... we laughed... the teacher helpers got super mad...

I am going to hell.
 
When I was at high school, my private school gave our batch of students two common rooms (one for girls, one for guys). We could hang out and relax any time we felt like it. Unfortunately, the school made the mistake of putting in a computer in each of the common rooms.

The girls did absolutely squat with their PC; it just sat there, and eventually a couple of us guys took over and started putting songs on it. Our own PC was turned into jukebox. Then strange things began to happen. First, the mouseball disappeared. Next was the CD-ROM drive, followed by the RAM and HD. They never caught who did it.
 
I'm a junior network admin at my school right now. I can get access to all users and files on our novell network (the linux network will come soon enough) so I sometimes just go to a random persons user folder and change a few things in their latest essay that they're writing. Mostly just subtle things, which they most often notice. I did it to one person in my English class and he didn't notice it, but the teacher did. she later asked him why it said "I like doggy porn" in his Macbeth essay.


I will definetly try some of these out at school or here and there. I'm going to a LAN party next week so I'll try out the guest user one.
 
I'm a junior network admin at my school right now. I can get access to all users and files on our novell network (the linux network will come soon enough) so I sometimes just go to a random persons user folder and change a few things in their latest essay that they're writing. Mostly just subtle things, which they most often notice. I did it to one person in my English class and he didn't notice it, but the teacher did. she later asked him why it said "I like doggy porn" in his Macbeth essay.


I will definetly try some of these out at school or here and there. I'm going to a LAN party next week so I'll try out the guest user one.
Click to expand...

LMAO. :lol: :lol:
 
We discovered that if you ran Microsoft's antispyware and Ad-Aware at the same time on my old high school's computers, it would delete all the security software on it.

Another fun thing to do is to boot up the computer with a live Linux CD...and bypass all security software completely.

Another fun thing is to bring in your iPod or some other large flash drive, install a game like UT2004 or Halo on it, and play games over the LAN. I started that trend senior year, and it only got more popular after that. Pretty much everyone was playing UT during study halls or classes by the end of the year.
 
Programmers Jokes....

1. Doomed and Dehacked(anyone remember this tool?)

Waaaaaay back in the days of Dos 6.22 and playing Doom 2 with a good
friend over a serial link I wrote a quick program to replace his doom2.exe

Upon running it he got an exact replica of the Format command running
and asking "Format C: [Y/N]"(Can't remember the exact dos text these days).

Obviously by this point panic had set in, Even to the point there was an
audible squeak of worry from this grown man!(I held my calm and tried not to smile). By this point he is totally taken in by it.

I take a look...

Me : "Hmm Press No then!"

N he presses and

"Format C: [Y/N] Y"
"Formatting C:..."

Is what he gets. At this point my program is happily causing disk activity to make it look authentic.
after a short while of him panicking and me trying my very hardest to not burst with laughter the program then said

"Hahahaha you should see the look on your face - Priceless"

I will not repeat what he said next, But needless to say it was not polite and all I could do was laugh.


2. TSR's and your keyboard lights..

Again back in the days of dos and doom 2.

We had setup for a nights gaming and been playing for a while, as per the last joke he'd left the room just long
Enough for me to get a floppy disk to his machine and start the TSR off.

It waited about 10 minutes before beginning to randomly change his Num,Caps and scroll lock LED's - Slowly at first
But gradually they increased in speed until it was like a strobe.

It caused great confusion and another laugh for me as he asked immediately "WTF did you do to my computer"
As if I had done something before! Me??? Never 😉


M.
 
Nice thread... (Yes I know I'm speaking in short sentences)

Gives me some ideas. For anyone that wants to do some serious prankage look up "Evil Twin Attack". The process is kinda complicated and a bit labor intensive, but it is almost hacker level.
I've done it m self.......
 
Youngest kids grade where slipping so I passworded his and the admins accounts. About a week later he comes to me and shows me his latest test results,"Can I use my computer?", he plaeds. "Get your grades up.", I replied and he wanders off. Next day he asks again, I give him the same response. Again the next day he asks, "GETYOURGRADESUP, all caps no spaces", I replied. It finally sunk in, that was the password. :lol:
DC
 
while we are on the topic of small time highschool pranks...

our highschools admin username and password....

were...

teacher
teacher

IDIOTS! We got on that and would reak havok in the library... they had applications to help teachers monitor the students and move the mice... so we did... and it was fun. Till we got caught... and when we did our defense was

teacher
teacher????

YOU IDIOTS!!!

(everyone try this... if it happened once.... it will probably happen again)
 
I'm a junior network admin at my school right now. I can get access to all users and files on our novell network (the linux network will come soon enough) so I sometimes just go to a random persons user folder and change a few things in their latest essay that they're writing. Mostly just subtle things, which they most often notice. I did it to one person in my English class and he didn't notice it, but the teacher did. she later asked him why it said "I like doggy porn" in his Macbeth essay.


I will definetly try some of these out at school or here and there. I'm going to a LAN party next week so I'll try out the guest user one.
Click to expand...

rofl! I think thats the funniest one so far. It looks like you were nice though with what you put in there essays, i would of put a lot wierder stuff in.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom