Personally, I refuse to use any program to perform a neat-o trick that I can do manually unless I write that program myself. I’m bizarre that way, I know.
To keep things rolling, I present yet another Stupid Computer Trick:
Win95 to Win3.1
This trick merely changes the shell from Explorer.exe to Progman.exe, the shell that Win3.1 used. There’s no real point to it, unless you truly prefer the Win3.1 interface or are nostalgic. This is the trick I got suspended from high school (for a day) for performing, because they thought I’d actually uninstalled Win95 and returned the machine to 3.1 or something.
Click on Start, then select Run. Type in “sysedit” and press Enter.
Of the windows that show up in the main System Configuration Editor window, click on System.INI to bring it to the foreground.
Find the line that reads “shell=Explorer.exe”. It should be right near the top.
Edit the line to read “shell=progman.exe”. It’s that simple. Save the file, of course. You can easily edit the system.ini file in notepad or another text editor, if you prefer.
Restart Windows and it will look like Win3.1 instead of the Win95 desktop. To undo this, just open the System.ini file and edit it so that the line reads “shell=Explorer.exe” again.
Go to the mouse contol and move the settings all to the fastest possible. That’s were I use them, and I find most people can’t handle that set up. Newbies can never double click and others over shoot the buttons.
[pathetic self-pity]Why can’t my threads last more than a couple of days, tops? I’m a worthless baboon.[/pathetic self-pity]
Well, I’m going to keep it alive at least a little longer, even if I’m the only one posting, and even if (as is inevitable) the tricks keep getting stupider.
Cheating Minesweeper
Minesweeper is fun, but I suck at it. That’s why I cheat.
Open Notepad (or another text-editor; I prefer Notepad for its simplicity)
Open the file WINMINE.INI, which is located in the C:\WINDOWS\ directory.
You’ll see lines that start with “Time1=”, “Time2=”, “Name1=”, etc. This is pretty much self-explanatory. Instead of the value currently after “Time1=”, add whatever time you want for the beginner difficulty setting. I like using 0, even though it’s obvious then that I’m cheating, as there is no way to defeat any difficulty setting on Minesweeper in 0 seconds. After “Name1=”, put whatever name you want.
Example: Time1=0
Time2=0
Time3=0
Name1=BK
Name2=BK
Name3=BK
Save the file. Now, when you run Minesweeper and view the high scores, the names and times you just entered will appear. Amaze your friends! Astound your enemies!
If this thread doesn’t start picking up pace, I’m going to have to explain how to forge e-mail. grin
Stop the clock:
Start a game and push both mouse buttons at the same time.
This will mark 9 spaces. Now, depress both mouse buttons and push Escape. This will stop the clock.
Reveal whether a space is safe or not:
To turn it on an indicator that will show whether a space is safe to click on or not, type xyzzy, then press [enter], then [shift]. The indicator will be a single white pixel in the upper left had corner of the screen.Make sure there is not a program covering this area, or you won’t see it.
To Draw one card in a Draw 3 Solitaire game:
Hold down [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[Alt] while clicking on the deck to draw your cards.
If you have an inclination to meddle with NT or W2K, I recommend http://is-it-true.org/ It’s full of handy little tweaks, tricks, and hacks.
I loaded themes and a new startup screen on my NT box at the office–my coworkers are still baffled by my Final Fantasy VIII theme. My startup screen is a shot of Balamb Garden rather than a certain hated corporate logo.
You rock BurnMeUp! Thanks!
I set up a subdirectory in my start menu called “phone numbers” and have another subdirectory for each person, and a file with their phone number as a filename. It makes it so easy to find their number. I could, if I wanted to make it a batchfile that dialed my modem (if I had one) but I’m not that far gone yet…
This little shell replacement can do any of the things you mentioned and so much more. http://www.litestep.org, I’m currently using turtle soup II, I think this program rocks and I love when people come look at my computer and say “where’s the start menu” or “what’s that big turtle for” I just snicked and remember how big of a dork I am
does anyone know any good trick for macs, and thanks for the desktop screenshot idea it was great to see my dad restat his pc 4 times before i changed it back.
One of my favorite harmless practical jokes is to change the auto-correction feature in MSWord to ‘correct’ common words into something else. For example make it where everytime someone types in the word ‘the’ it changes to the word ‘cow’, or every time your boss’s name is typed, it changes to ‘asshole’ or something like that.
OK, I feel quite stupid asking, seeing as I’m majoring in Computer Science, but how exactly do I do this? I went into windows explorer and un-checked the box marked “read-only”…but when I finally found the word “s t a r t” in the code and tried to change it, it said, “You cannot modify a read-only file.” Do I need to change the attributes thru DOS? If so…how?
idiotboy, this is so cute… a wet behind the ears techie…
Boot from DOS, and then run edit, or, boot off of the cd, this way explorer.exe in your Windows directory won’t be in use, you can change it’s attributes, and modify the file.
now it should be turned off (though it should’ve done it anyways in windows).
Neat tricks. Try this.
If your computer doesn’t have a soundcard/speaker, install a PC speaker driver and make sure it loads from each boot-up. Now goto the web and find some short weird sounds (e.g. snoores, moans, or “You’re Fired!”). Load these sounds during Windows Open, in SOUNDS menu from SETTINGS. Not a biggie but it’s still fun for them to hear in the first time.
Yeah. You can try ResEdit, though it’s intended use is for developers to manipulate resources within files. It comes in handy when you want to make certain files/applications/folders… etc. invisible, unoticeable…
Even better, if you know your MacOS really well, you can try this, I’ve done this to one of my cow-workers…
Changed his desktop/appearance settings to something undesireable, configured his desktop clock to chime on the hour, quarter hour, and half hour with that annoying Mac quack sound, then in ResEdit, rendered the control panels, preferences, and any necessary extensions invisible, and renamed them as well as changed their icon so that through even the roughest search, unless he used ResEdit, couldn’t figure out where they were. He was stuck with his desktop and sounds, except for bonus points, the next day I let him see his control panel for his desktop pictures again, only when ever he tried to change the picture, he would get a dialog box that made some rude innuendos… and just yesterday, I compiled a script (if you have OSA extensions and scripts in your macs) that launched when he tried to adjust volume, it came up with a false dialog box prompting the formatting of his harddrive and any connected drives, with only two buttons for choices, “OK”, and “Go Ahead”.
You can tamper with dialog boxes and settings in applications through ResEdit, but I strongly suggest you make backups first, ResEdit can destroy your Mac if your’e not careful.
Applescript is great, for silly little scripts like the one I made, though I’m sure you can download them off the web as well.
Using the Get Information option in your menus for files/applications, you can change the icons of files to fool fellow friends and coworkers…
Only thing I do is change the Trash can’s name. You can’t, at least on NT4.0, chage it directly from the screen you need to get into the Regedit to do it. I changed a buddies at work about two years ago and I don’t think he ever got it back. Even the tech guy couldn’t change it back.
Ok, so I got it changed, however not to what I wanted it to. I tried doing Alt-0, but instead of inserting the “null” character, it wanted to select a menu from above…again, I suppose some assistance is needed…
