7 Awesome Computer Pranks

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..

funny computer pranks <credit>

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..

shut down command

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.

clippy

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.

screw screen colors

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

pop-up

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.

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Rating: 9.2/10 (5 votes cast)
7 Awesome Computer Pranks, 9.2 out of 10 based on 5 ratings


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. You can check out his posts here Digital World

49 Responses to “7 Awesome Computer Pranks”

  1. Vinayak

    Jul 31. 2011

    hahaha…. that’s really informative post… thanks buddy…!!!!

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    • TechCrates

      Jul 31. 2011

      Thanks to Karan for contributing this post …

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  2. karan

    Jul 31. 2011

    :O thanks for publishing my post salman. I am really excited about this one:D

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  3. Praveen

    Jul 31. 2011

    That’s cool and fun! Thanks for sharing it 🙂

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    • TechCrates

      Aug 01. 2011

      Thanks to Karan for the great post ….

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  4. shashank chinchli

    Aug 01. 2011

    Played pranks a lot with this small commands and terrorised many friends during high school days!I never used to understand what codes were and always used to play first on myself!!

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  5. Akhil

    Aug 01. 2011

    Its a really good share. will try dis.

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  6. Business logo design

    Aug 01. 2011

    Your post have the information that is helpful and very informative. I would like you to keep up the good work.Thanks for sharing.

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  7. fazal mayar

    Aug 02. 2011

    those are pretty funny pranks that we should all try. I think i will try the fake keyboard keys 😀

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    • TechCrates

      Aug 02. 2011

      Good to know that …

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  8. karan

    Aug 02. 2011

    thanks@ vinayak, praveen, shashank, akhil, ‘business logo’ and fazal for your awesome comments:D

    Great to see you guys here and i am really happy that you liked the pranks. Tc..

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  9. Atish

    Aug 02. 2011

    Super cool pranks. thanks dude. I just loved them

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    • TechCrates

      Aug 02. 2011

      Good to know that ….

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  10. Martin

    Aug 02. 2011

    I can imagine the look on my friends’ faces. I admit these pranks are funny yet scary. You provided useful information in a way I can also be prepared in case someone pulls these pranks on me.

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  11. Ikenna

    Aug 02. 2011

    Lol! These are really funny pranks. I’ll the one on virus on my crazy friend. I’ll love to see the look on his face.
    Will be tweeting..

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    • TechCrates

      Aug 02. 2011

      Sure … do share what happens !!

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  12. Maninder

    Aug 02. 2011

    Nice pranks. I have tried the shutdown thing already but some of these are quite new. Thanks for sharing this.

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  13. Olawale Daniel

    Aug 03. 2011

    Thanks Karan for the information that you just shared here. top computer’s pranks..Thanks 🙂

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    • karan

      Aug 03. 2011

      thanks olawale bro:)

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  14. android phones review

    Aug 03. 2011

    really funny and interesting, a difference topic so get a punk

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    • karan

      Aug 03. 2011

      glad you enjoyed it. And ya sometimes its better to go a bit off topic and write about things that people may enjoy:D

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  15. Priyangshu

    Aug 04. 2011

    Nice post Karan !!! Funny & Interesting !!!

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  16. plaban

    Aug 09. 2011

    Nice Pranks, I’ll try some of these on my friends pc.

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  17. rakesh

    Aug 16. 2011

    nice pranks, Thanks for posting them here

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    • TechCrates

      Aug 16. 2011

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting 🙂

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  18. Sandipan Mukherjee

    Sep 12. 2011

    Computer can even talk with the help of VB Script.
    Very informative and nice article. Thanks for sharing.

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  19. Ana

    Oct 01. 2011

    I have all my work on this computer and if somebody pulled those frozen icons on me I think I’d just freak out!

    I love the Clippy thing! I think I’d smash my computer myself 😀

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  20. hifu prostate cancer

    Oct 15. 2011

    Shutdown Virus seems like the best prank among the list. I can’t wait to see the look of my friend’s face.

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  21. prabhat

    Mar 18. 2012

    HI ADMIN…
    i’ve tried many of the tips you mentioned here..and they all work perfectly..
    and making a virus is really and undoubtedly my favorite one..
    because once i made the virus (i mean the popup windows trick)in my friend’s computer and he thought that its a virus…and i couldn’t stop myself from laughing..
    nice pranks…keep it up

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    • TechCrates

      Mar 18. 2012

      That’s really great … Thanks for your comment

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  22. Richmond

    Mar 18. 2012

    lol…these are some super cool pranks here, thanks for sharing man, i liked the first one best, just tried it on one of my friends lappi, waiting for him to come back to work. thanks again! 😀

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    • TechCrates

      Mar 18. 2012

      Thanks for your comment …

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  23. sham

    Mar 19. 2012

    That’s a nice list buddy. Love pranks like these. I actually have a separate category just for pranks in my old blog. Some of them went viral too 🙂

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    • TechCrates

      Mar 19. 2012

      Thanks for stopping by and commenting Sham 😉

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  24. Puneet

    Mar 19. 2012

    The best one is disco light. Superb. By the way I have already tried all except this disco light. Now I enjoyed this very much. thanks for sharing few cool pranks here.

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    • TechCrates

      Mar 19. 2012

      You’re most welcome ….

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      • Puneet

        Mar 21. 2012

        Hey Buddy, I would love to see a list of internet pranks too. Please write a post for that too. I will be waiting for this post.

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        • TechCrates

          Mar 21. 2012

          Let me think about that ….

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  25. septem

    Mar 19. 2012

    these post have the information that is helpful and very informative to us . I would like you to keep up the good work.Thanks for sharing and i will follow these blog everytime you put new blog in here .

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  26. Atish

    Mar 19. 2012

    Tried all these pranks already. nice share dude. I loved the shutdown prank. its nice.

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  27. marco

    Mar 20. 2012

    very funny, I used some on my girlfriends laptop, I can’t wait for the storys she has to telle me about todays work 😀

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  28. Damien

    Mar 20. 2012

    I did this pranks back in school. I once1 changed the color scheme of the desktop and change the locations of the keys in the keyboard, much to the anger of my teacher.

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    • TechCrates

      Mar 20. 2012

      You made me recollect those olden but golden days …

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  29. Dan

    Mar 21. 2012

    very cool pranks. I will share this with my 13 year old son, we wants to be a hacker (ethical of course) so we will love this.

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    • TechCrates

      Mar 21. 2012

      That’s great Dan …

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  30. Prakash

    Mar 21. 2012

    nice computer pranks…..i enjoyed all of these……
    thanks for sharing it………….

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    • TechCrates

      Mar 21. 2012

      You’re welcome …

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  31. Shri

    Jul 14. 2014

    I admit these pranks are funny yet scary. You provided useful information in a way I can also be prepared in case someone pulls these pranks on me.

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