5 Great Computer Pranks

Welcome to tinkernut.com’s video cast. In this video I am going to show you some computer pranks that you can do for April Fools Day. Soon that is coming up. First one I am going to show you how to do is how to remap somebody’s keyboard. And this requires a free application to be downloaded unless you want do it through the registry which I highly don’t recommend. The website is randyrants.com and on the right hand side of the screen, you will see a program called SharpKeys. So just download the most recent version of this and install it on the computer. And this is going to allow you to make certain keys—map certain keys to other keys. So, once you launch the program, you will see this splash screen. And if you click the Add button, on the left hand side it gives you all the different keys that are listed for your keyboard. I am going to choose the “I” key. And on the right hand side, you can choose what key to map that too; what other key. So, I am going to choose to map the I key to the G key. And then just click Write to Registry and it’s going to require you to reboot or just log out of the computer. Now once you logged back in, if you want to make this a prank, delete the shortcut off the desktop. And then once they open up any typing program, all their I’s are going to be typed out as Gs. Now, to get rid of this, just open up SharpKeys and select the keys that you’ve mapped and hit delete. And hit Write to Registry and everything will go back to normal. And then you can just uninstall the program if you want. So the next prank I am going to show you how to do is adjust the auto correct options in Microsoft Word of Microsoft Outlook. So, if you open up Microsoft Word depending on which version you have. Go to Word Options and find the AutoCorrect Options. And in the AutoCorrect options, you can choose to replace any text with a different text. So, I am going to replace the word ‘the’ with the word ‘idiot’ and the word ‘and’ with the word ‘stupid.’ So every time they type the words ‘the’ or ‘and’, it’s going to automatically be replaced with these words. So, if I type out ‘I am the best and brightest.’ It changes to ‘I am idiot best stupid brightest’ which does not make any sense but it’s funny, right? So the next step is going to be how to hide the Start menu from users. This requires another free program. It’s found at the website www.tordex.com/startkiller. And it’s free to download, so just download it whether you have a 32 bit or a 64 bit program. And whenever you’re through downloading it, it should automatically launch. And as you can see, there’s absolutely no Start Menu. You can still hit the Windows button and it will pop-up. But to get rid of it, you’ll see this little knife icon, just right click on it and select Exit and the Start menu will come back up. So the best thing to do for this, so that they don’t have to startup the program themselves is to create a shortcut for it. Just put it on your desktop and then cut that shortcut and put it in the Windows startup folder. So, if you go to All Programs and Startup and right click on that. And select open. You can then paste this in the Startup folder. So every time the computer starts up, this program will startup as well. So this next prank is my favorite. It’s the Vista Upgrade prank and it’s very simple but very convincing. Just do a Google search for Vista Upgrade prank and the first link should be to RJL Software and you can download it from their website. It also gives kind of a description of the program and how to get rid of it, things like that. So, I am going to extract this to the Startup folder. To do that, just right click and open up the Startup folder and then just copy the entire path name and paste it into the folder to Unzip. And then just click Unzip. And I am going to delete the read me file but we’ll just keep vista.exe in startup and this is what it looks like. It looks like a Vista upgrade that you click, cancel, install, the close button and it won’t go away. The cancel button just graze out and the X button doesn’t work. And even if you click close, it keeps going. You’re forced to click Next and it just goes through the steps of these—as if it’s upgrading to Vista. And then it will say, Upgrade Successful.’ And then the screen goes to this. And it shows the Windows Vista Startup logo. And then the desktop pops-up. Obviously, it’s not Vista but you can’t do anything with it. And then to get out of it, just double click and it all goes away. And you see this little banner that says, you just been pranked. So that is my favorite one. The next one we’re going to go to is the screen color prank. It’s made by the same people at RJL Software. So, if you just do a Google search for screenscrew and click on the RJL software link, you can download screenscrew. And basically, what this does is it just screws the colors of your screen. And again, I’m just going to extract this to this startup folder. So if I open up this startup folder, I’m going to go ahead and delete the read me file again. And I will just go and delete Startup Killer as well. We’re through with that. But this is what it looks like. It totally screws up the screen colors and the contrast and things like that. And to get rid of it, what you have do to is move your mouse to the upper left hand corner. And this didn’t work for me right off, so I’ll show you an alternate way. But generally it should shut down and give you the close option. If that doesn’t work, if you move your mouse to the upper left hand corner and nothing happens, you can hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Go to Processes. Select Screenscrew and click on End process. And that will stop it. Then you can just drag the window around the screen to get rid of where the program stopped. And RJL software has a ton of other applications that are great for pranking. So, if you go to their web—go back to that webpage and select the click here link, you’ll see all the different applications. So, this is a good way to prank somebody and have a happy April Fool’s Day. And for more, go to tinkernut.com.