A bit of fun.... Sabotage !!

ando

Right I want to sabotage a PC (Windows 2000), not permanently but just for a day or two without losing any data and I'd prefare if it was a 'on next reboot' fault. Any ideas?

My reasons for doing this are not malicious, more like a practical joke on a know it all idiot

abccormac

Set it on fire?

Capt'n Midnight

sabotage windows - just leave it for a while it'll do it all by itself...

printscreen the desktop
move the icons to the edge of screen
shrink the taskbar and put at top
use the zoom on the monitor so all clickable stuff not visible

guess what you choose as wallpaper

the blue screen of death screensaver on sysinternals is good too.

hshortt

If you have remote or physical access then just rename the boot.ini file on the root of the system drive. The machine will not reboot successfully.

Cheerio

Chalk

sellotape on the mouse ball will confuse most people for a while

Keyzer

hshortt wrote:

If you have remote or physical access then just rename the boot.ini file on the root of the system drive. The machine will not reboot successfully.

Cheerio

He did say not permanently...
If renaming boot.ini stops the machine from booting then how is he supposed to revert it back?

Gilgamesh

superglue the mouse to the mousepad

SantaHoe

Set the active desktop to ratemypoo.com then lock him out of the display properties with some local policy editing... being sure to rename mmc.exe for the day.

a know it all idiot

Maybe he does know it all... have you tried asking him?

SantaHoe

Another faverite of mine is having a batch file run a looping 'net send' so in effect, he has a message box that he can click OK to a thousand times and it'll never dissapear. (with a message of your choice)
Better to have this run from another machine on the network, but failing that, you could run it locally if you can hide the process window somehow... although coupled with the old hidden taskbar this shouldn't be a problem.

qwertz

Uplug the data cable from the hard disk.

hshortt

heh heh, reverting to a good boot.ini is the question for which I charge to answer... but seeing as you asked nice and all.

You create a boot floppy with a good Boot.ini on it and the machine will boot. Creating NT/2000 Boot floppies is well documented. Once up, rename or revert to the original boot.ini on the root of the C:\ drive.

The disk, could even become a haggling point.

Cheers

Dingatron

Remove the IDE cable and boot it with a linux boot cd. We'll see how much he knows outside of windose. Mind you there is a risk that he'll never go back and then he will know it all. :-)

irishgeo

Take a screenshot of his desktop, delete his icons to the desktop and then use the screenshot as his background. disable the the display settings.

Gone West

did you post this same thread in humour? somebody recently posted a very simiilar question, check that out for more ideas/answers

Victor

Try changing the boot up sound to something more colourful and turn up the speakers.

Gone West

oh get tweakxp and give it a nice "questionable" boot up logo. So instead of saying windows xp professional edition, it could say windows xp prostitute edition (with matching logo!)

SantaHoe

Change the start button text to something manky.

Modify every shortcut on the start menu to link to the start menu folder... preserve the icons for extra effect.

Capt'n Midnight

scheduled tasks
screensaver and power management settings set to 1 minute
setup hibernation
use pagedefrag on every boot

edit the boot.ini file to ignore some memory / turn off cache in the BIOS
put on the boot floppy so you can just remove it

setup a batch file on another pc to spam his machine with

:start
net send "username" Press Ok to continue.
goto start

SantaHoe

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

setup a batch file on another pc to spam his machine with

:start
net send "username" Press Ok to continue.
goto start

Yes, this brings back memories alright... "Click OK if you're a %$!£$!" also works.

Another neat way of hiding the source of a messagebox is the good old active desktop... stick this into a html file... then set it as the desktop.

<html>

<body>

<script language="javascript">
while(1<2)
{
 alert("Are you sure you want to uninstall Microsoft Internet Explorer?");
}
</script>

</body>

</html>

Now the beauty of this is that the title of the messagebox will just have "Microsoft Internet Explorer" so it'll look pretty legit... also the page is being run (afaik) by explorer.exe and not iexplore... so there's no obvious running process to kill.
The javascript is set to loop forever... the only downside is that this messagebox doesn't stay ontop of the other windows... maybe someone with a better knowledge of javascript than I can arrange something more fiendish

Actually, I've just noticed upon testing that this messagebox has the side-effect of disabling a right-click on the desktop or a left-click on any desktop icons... sweet.
Oh, and the javascript continues to run even after the desktop wallpaper has been changed... great, I'm off to reboot

Update: Damn, yet another bonus... the shutdown hung... so I had to do a hard reboot... excellent.

thund3rbird_

PASSWORD PROTECT THE DESKTOP FOLDER

Right-click on empty space in a folder and select CUSTOMIZE THIS FOLDER, then choose CREATE HTML DOCUMENT FOR THIS FOLDER. Once the document is opened in Notepad, scroll down until you see <script language>="JavaScript"> Insert a blank line after this string. Now, insert the following text (with hard carriage returns where noted):

var pass = prompt("Enter the password") [ENTER] if(pass != "YOURPASSWORD") [ENTER] {window.location="C:"} [ENTER]

Put a password in the place of YOURPASSWORD but leave the quotes. Save the document, exit Notepad, refresh the folder (or hit F5), enter your new password, and the next time you try to enter that folder, you'll be prompted for your password. If you enter a wrong password you'll end up in C: drive!

This works on Windows 98/ME/2000.

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CREATE A "RESTART" SHORTCUT AND PLACE IT IN THE STARTUP FOLDER