April Fool’s Day Computer pranks!

Posted on March 14, 2007 at 10:32 pm

Here’s some good software if you’re in the mood to play some good computer pranks on your friends or family or just to piss off your annoying co-worker. There are a couple of sites that I found that had a good collection of stuff:

http://www.rjlsoftware.com/software/entertainment/

This site has almost 30 tiny little applications that do all sorts of stuff! My favorites are the Add/Remove which pretends to remove all the software from your computer; Fake Format which pretends to format your drive with real dialogs and summaries; and the Vista upgrade prank which fakes installs Windows Vista.

Here’s another site that had some interesting software:

http://www.eakles.com/pranks.html

One of my all time favorite pranks, however, is the simplest and most elegant of all. It doesn’t involve installing any software whatsoever. It’s the switch out the desktop trick with a duplicate image prank. The way it works is that you get a screen shot of the desktop, move all the desktop icons to a folder and then set the background to the desktop image you created.

Here’s how to do it:

First close all your programs and move your mouse all the way to the bottom of the screen, so that it’s not showing when we take the snap shot of the desktop. Next press the Print Screen key on your keyboard.

Now go to Start, All Programs, Accessories and then choose Paint. From the top menu, go to Edit and choose Paste.

Your image of the desktop will appear exactly as the desktop appears normally. Now here’s the fun part. Go ahead and save the file as a .bmp (bitmap), which is by default for Paint, to some place on the computer. Close Paint and open Windows Explorer. Go to the root of the C drive and create a folder called Desktop Icons and MOVE all of the icons from the desktop into the folder. To move, simply select all the files and right-click while dragging the files to the folder, and when you release the button, it will ask you whether you want to copy or move.

Now right click on the desktop and go to properties, choose the Desktop tab and click Browse to find your picture.

Select the picture and click OK! And now the desktop looks exactly like it was before except that your unsuspecting victim will not be able to click on any of the icons and will feel terribly stupid asking the IT support team why he/she can’t seem to open anything!