April Fools Special : Top 5 Classic PC Pranks

For today's April Fools, Techdy Bear proudly brings you the Top 5 Classic PC Pranks.

Are you ready to pull up a couple of pranks on your friends, colleagues or family members? 

Here are the Top 5 Classic PC Pranks :

1. Unclickable desktop

Allright, this one is really old but sometimes users will not know what happened. Just make a screenshot of your desktop by pressing "Print Screen" on your keyboard (sometimes shown as "Print Scrn"). Now go to Paint and Paste (Ctrl+V). You should now have an image of your desktop. Save the image to your PC (not on your desktop) and save it as BMP. You'll now have the file like this: C:/Desktop.bmp.

Next, right-click on your desktop and select Properties. Select the tab Desktop and click Browse... Navigate to your screenshot and press OK to set it as your background. You're almost done now.

Right-click your desktop again and navigate to "Arrange icons by" and uncheck "Show desktop icons". There you have it, the icons on the desktop can not be clicked anymore. 

2. Desktop Upside Down

Do you still have the image from the previous prank? Open it again in Paint. Now rotate the image (Ctrl+R) and set it to 180 degrees. Save to file again as BMP, like this: C:/Potksed.bmp.

Now set the image again as your background and there you have it: Your desktop is turned upside down. But wait: The taskbar at the bottom is still there? Right-click on it and select Properties. On the Taskbar tab, select the Auto-hide the taskbar check box. Press OK to save the changes.

3. Strange Sounds

A PC has some build-in audio files that are played when doing something. For example, when you start navigating you'll hear a "click" and when you disconnect a USB device you'll hear another sound. Change these sounds into something that you want!

First, search on the internet for the correct audio file (Example: Farts, Screams etc.). If the file is in MP3 format, convert them to WAV. Save the WAV files to C:/WINDOWS/Media/.
Now go to Start > Settings > Control Panel and double click on "Sounds and Audio Devices". Go to the tab Sounds and look for the correct sound in the list that you want to change. Change it by selecting the event and clicking on Browse... Navigate and select your new WAV file and press OK to save.

Be creative and your prank will succeed.

4. Boogieman

Normally, WAV files are played with Windows Media Player. In this joke, you don't want this to happen. We'll write a VBS-file (Visual Basic) in this joke that will run audio files that you can't see.
Open up Notepad and copy the following code:
strSoundFile = "C:\WINDOWS\Media\[YOURSOUNDFILE].wav"
Set objShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
strCommand = "sndrec32 /play /close" & chr(34) & strSoundFile & chr(34)
objShell.Run strCommand, 0, False

Change the [YOURSOUNDFILE] to the sound file you want to play. Now save the file to your harddisk, like this: C:/Sound.vbs. Double-click the VBS file to try if it works.

You probably want to play these files automaticly. You can do this by creating tasks. Go to Start > All programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks. A new window will appear. Double click on "Add scheduled task" and follow the instructions. Select your VBS file when the wizard asks if you want to open a software application. You want your PC to scream at 4 AM?

5. Shotcuts Changed

Pretty corny joke, but still one that can drive other users insane. Shortcuts are nothing more than files pointing to other files that they should startup. For example, if you have a Windows Media Player shortcut on your desktop, right click on the shortcut and select Properties. The Target will be something like:C:/Program Files/Windows Media Player/wmplayer.exe. Change this line into another one, like C:/Program Files/MSN Messenger/msnmsgr.exe for MSN Messenger. Press OK to save the changes.

Probably the icon will have changed too. No problem about that, you can change that. Right-click the shortcut and select Properties. Choose the Shortcut tab. Click on the Change Icon button and navigate to your previous program, such as Windows Media Player. Click "Open" to select the file and press OK to save.

Try getting on their PC and set up one (or more!) of these pranks.  

CAUTION : They're all totally harmless and will give you a LAUGH!

sources : Marco Folio