Since BK doesn’t really want his thread to die so fast, I think I might add a small hijack. [hijack] Can anyone explain what the whole buisness of a shell is? How does it work and the such. Thanks [/hijack].
Well a shell is the way that the windows OS interperts and runs dos. So in windows 9x and Me Explorer is the shell that is run in dos to produce a graphical user interface, it controls how the programs are access and attributes are adjusted. Litestep (link posted above) is a shell replacement for explorer, I find it more fun to define my graphical user interface on my own. you could get a shell account on a Unix machine which would allow you to run Unix programs on windows through the machine you are remotely connected to. Hope that cleared it up
teabag
An oldie put goodie. I told my coworkers to figure out what the screen saver was doing. The people at work couldn’t figure that one out for a week. I broke down and told them after a week. Dah!
My mother inspired the next. Turn the brightness down until you have a black screen. Now take it into a repair shop, because it doesn’t work. Techs have a laugh for the next day or two.
Oops! You’re right, I think. Try copying and pasting the null character from another part of the file (should be all over the place).
I almost added the information about how to change file permissions in DOS, but I thought, “Nah, the post is long enough as it is.”
I guess not everyone is as much of a DOS-phile as I am. 
(Which reminds me of the time in Computer Science I when I wrote a simple batch file that did nothing but start notepad and loop … 88 copies of Notepad later, the computer ran out of memory. Hehe.)
DOS was so easy to screw with peoples minds. A few changes in the right places and people thought the hard drive was about to be formatted. <Press any key to continue>
How about changing the DOS prompt. My computer always read “Your wish is my command Master.” Anybody else booting up was lost at this point.
Wow, that was close, I came about 1/2 from losing everyting due to the start menu trick. thank god for recovery disks. I edited explorer.exe like you said, and then saved it as explorer2.exe then I renamed explorer.exe to explorit.exe. Then, like a dumb-ass I thought I could just rename explorer2.exe to explorer.exe. Didn’t happen. But I’m back to normal now w/o the edited start button. (Doh!) I did all my editing in DOS. It still said explorer.exe was read-only, after I messed with the properties, that’s why went through all the non-sense above, to try and get around the denial of editing. I guess I still don’t get it. It was a real rush almost losing everything and then figuring out how to get it back. I love computers!
:Lord, I just found what a nerd I am:
You guys probably already know this one, but it’s my favorite for all-around-messing-with-those-who-know-nothing-about-computers, and is harmless, and is easy to fix!
And I want to keep this thread alive (I loveit!)
Preferably done with brand-new computer, and user!
Take the mouse ball out when the sucker isn’t looking, and hide it (if it’s an optical mouse, a post-it over the camera-thingy works quite well…)!
When the stooge calls you (the by-comparison “expert”) over, you poke thru the windows files, run any diagnostics you have, re-boot and go into the BIOS settings… anything you can think of that you can do without a mouse and looks impressive to a newbie! Then ask something like: “You DID descanfrag the registry before you shut down the last time, right? I’ve heard you can really fry a motherboard if you don’t do that…”
When they reply with a horrified “WHAT?” You feign shock and say “OH MY GOD!!”
Keep it going as long as you can keep a straight face… but be prepared to run!
bump
Just curious krillin if you tried any mac tricks?
handy, thanx for posting that link, I used DoubleDesktop here at work, very similar to what I can do on my Linux box at home only it’s limited to two virtual desktops, well… It’s loaded, and nobody knows what the heck happened to anything that was on the desktop before :eek:
Lots of fun hitting the hot key quickly and showing them that everything is fine… until I hit it again and leave…
They have no clue…
I’m using it at home as well and it’s cool, it’s on a Windows shell and lets you choose two different desktops… gonna have to look into how they do that…
Did you know that there is a flight simulator-type-thingy in Microsoft Excel 97? It puts you in a bizarre, dark, purply world and you can fly around using your mouse. There is also a big gray angular stone that scrolls the names of the creators of Excel 97 in a biblical style. It’s very strange, here’s how to do it.
Open Microsoft Excel 97. Don’t run other programs.
Open a new blank work sheet.
Press F5.
Type X97:L97 in the “Reference” box.
Click OK.
Hit the “Tab” key once to end up in cell M97.
Press “Ctrl” and “Shift” while clicking once on the “Chart Wizard” icon (the one at the top with the blue-yellow-red bar chart).
After a few moments you should be flying. Steer with the mouse, accelerate and decelerate with the left and right mouse buttons respectively, and hunt for the monolith. Exit by pressing Esc.
Mine doesn’t do anything but send the word volcano flying all around the screen… I’m assuming it should do something cooler? 
I just checked it again for Win Me OS. It still works like it used too. The screen saver has to be “3D Text” and use all small letters and no spaces. Type in volcano and if it doesn’t work for you this time, I’ll tell you what it does.
Hint: You shouldn’t see the word volcano, when it runs.
Phobia, my DOS prompt was the normal C:\yadda yadda yadda but in a different color (with a different background color too). I love DOS.
(If I can find my DOS 5.0 manual around here somewhere, I’ll post how to that; something to do with ANSI.SYS, IIRC.)
BTW, thank you to everyone who responded to the OP! I love you all!
Last year this kid in my school stole all the mouse balls from the 25 or 30 computers in the computer lab… no one was happy (but the kid who did it got caught and then he was the unhappy one :)). It was pretty funny.
I was wondering if anyone knew how to change the text of “Windows 98” once you click on the start menu. I’ve seen stuff added before, which I wouldn’t mind doing, but if at all possible I’d like to change that. Any ideas?
FTR- I finally changed the Start text w/o losing all of windows. 3rd times the charm!
‘cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/audio’
Really, anything catted into /dev/audio will make a noise of some sort. /dev/mouse (or gpmdata, or psaux, or whatever) makes more controllable noise.
“sl” is a program that runs an animated ASCII train when invoked. Good way to confuse someone who spooners “ls” often.
Any others?
Swing by http://www.resexcellence.com/ – more Mac-hacking tricks than you can shake Windows 98 at…
We’d always torture our new techs by ‘modifying’ their machines. The screenshot as wallpaper was a classic, as well as the left/right mouse button switch. Another favorite is to record a really long wav file (5 minutes or so) with nothing in it and set it as a shutdown sound. The machine will appear to hang for the length of the wav file.
The poor bastard who has to re-boot several times goes crazy trying to figure out what is hanging that damn machine up.
There’s also an NT ‘blue screen of death’ screen saver that has stopped the heart of many a newbie. It spins the hard drive and goes through an endless series of checks.
My new browser is “The corruptor”. My e-mail program is called “Virus Catching”. And I open my OS “Don’t do Windows for Me”.
I used to have a great hack for Win 9x…let you change the speed of the menu’s when they pop up from the Start button. Either slow them waaaay down, or make them so fast it’s hard to stay where you want. Great way to make a user think they have a faster computer. “Look, see how fast the menu’s pop up now?” I’m not sure of the exact path for the registry hack, so I’ll wait till I can find my notes on it.
Along similar paths, I also had a hack that would hide a drive from explorer and my computer. I’d routinly hide the A: drive on people just for the hell of it.
I remember mucking around with the Windows NT logo back on the school computers. Nearly had a whole room of computers using one of my images by the end of the year. And one of my friends at one time started replacing the desktop images (grey with a printed message about getting rid of crap on the network drive or something) with a picure of Hitler and with a message written over the top that read something like “Greetings from your friendly neighbourhood system administrator.” Needless to say he got into a little bit of trouble over that.