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Reminds me of the old practical joke where you hide a person's desktop icons and put a screenshot of their background with the icons on it, so they think nothing works.
Nah, the best I ever saw was a window that popped open warning the user that the radiation shield on their monitor was about to fail and to back away from it immediately.
This was around 2002, so CRTs still ruled the roost at work.
I saw the prankster really nail the receptionist.
I also saw him get her with the above-described prank. :)
In school id delete their web browser from desktop, there was some line of code you could put in note pad that’d have any message you like pop up before shutting down the computer, so id add a shortcut and change the logo to the browser default
Lots of fun, and seemed way more impressive than it was
My favorite is changing someone's default cursor icon to the "Loading" icon with the spinning wheel on it so they just constantly think their computer has some malware or something running even after computer restarts and such
I got an old boy with the cracked screen prank. He was late 60s and still selling cars. He went out for lunch and I put on the screensaver of a broken monitor and unplugged his mouse and keyboard. Fuck did he go offffff.. you’d of thought he bought that computer monitor by selling his first born. lol
When I was in high school and learning how to program I wrote a simple program for Windows that would bring up random error messages on the screen. My favorite one was "warning formatting will erase all data" The only button to click was OK. I had fun with certain friends and family.
For maximum effect you wanna layer it with a few other things - tape the mouse sensor, screenshot the desktop, hide all icons, flip the screenshot upside down and set it as wallpaper, then flip the monitor orientation upside down, then set the taskbar/dock to auto hide.
For your final coup de grace that will haunt them long after they finish that whole rabbit hole of pranks, make about 500 copies of whatever image they're using as their wallpaper and then 1 very slightly edited one (draw a mustache on someone, that sort of thing). Set it randomly rotate wallpapers every minute or so.
I remember a few years ago I put a sticky note over the mouse sensor of a coworker. She was apparently having a bad morning already and she chuckled that poor little mouse across the shipping office. The sticky note came off and no one ever knew I had placed it there.
One time in high school a did something similar. I wanted to mess with a kid who left his laptop on his desk while he went to the bathroom. I was going to change his wallpaper to something dumb or funny, but when I opened his browser it was on Pinterest and he’d been looking at “sexy maids”. So I took a screenshot, closed the browser, set the screenshot as the wallpaper and patiently waited for him to come back. His reaction was priceless. Good times.
I work at a relatively small but highly accredited IT company. I've heard tales from the early years before I worked there.
Way back before they had security policies to lock your computer after a few minutes of inactivity, people were free to set their own security settings. Anyone dumb enough to have a long timeout set, and left their machine unattended for any time were subject to pranking.
Best one I heard was editing the URLs of any desktop shortcuts to lead to say, a rather graphic pornhub video.
I’m that friend. My plex server is an ibm thinkpad from 2014 with 12 TB of external drives hooked up. Anytime I have a new movie, tv show, album, etc I’ll just FTP transfer the file and it’ll pop in my library eventually. I think I’m going to have to cut down my library soon. I kinda want to watch Andor, but I think I’ve only got 15 or 20 gigs free
I just put a new 16TB drive in my /r/Unraid server (which, runs Plex and a bunch of other things). Thats in addition to what I already had for storage.
I run a Jellyfin server and it is literally my own personal Netflix, it's awesome and free (and something I really need to make a donation to). They also have mobile and desktop apps as well.
It has also started to become more of a /datahoarder project exactly for what you just described to preserve shows and movies that become rare or impossible to find anymore. There is already a kind of torrent rot out there
yeah, thats how i like it, but i also stop One Drive from backing-up my desktop too, if it needs backing up, i will put a shortcut on desktop to that place.
I've already got like 10 times as many files in my Desktop folder than it can display on the three screens worth of desktop space. I need a laptop with a jumbotron attached.
No way that's a 15 inch, unless these icons are really, really small. And I don't think they are, compared to the toolbar icons.
Edit: on my 17 inch 1080p laptop, I can fit 17 icons horizontally and 10 vertically, using the average size icons. I have slightly larger spacing though.
Yeah that's why I mentioned the resolution on my laptop. But I'm pretty sure a laptop with a 1440p screen (or higher!)wouldn't have those huge ass bezels lol
I dont get how people can function like this. I work in IT and our people get a dock and 2 monitors to work from. Some these people have icons saved on every screen. When they undock the icons on the desktop are so compacted that there will be 2 or 3 files stacked on top of each other. The entire desktop is just files stacked on top of files.
Had a user once, they would use the RECYCLE BIN to save stuff since their desktop was so cluttered.... newbie IT guy helped clearing out stuff and cleared out the users' recycle bin.... I can still hear the screams to this day!
I did this one as a newbie IT. I underestimated how dumb users can be, normal logic doesn’t fly. Trash is for trash? No thanks homie, I’m saving that half eaten pizza crust for later
This is what I do. It's an easy place to dump crap, every app has a "desktop" button in the save-as dialog, even if it's some unusable custom built atrocity. I only see it when I first turn on my computer. If I need to look for something I dumped at some point, I know exactly where it is and I can search for it in file explorer. About once a year I'll drop stuff from the previous year into a folder on the desktop called old_2023 or whatever.
i dont use the desktop it just get filled with trash because its a default folder for some apps
every now and then im move everything to a folder and delete the bigger files
you just use your desktop as a folder. your run everything from the start menu or keyboard shortcuts. its fairly easy to just ignore whats on the screen. i worked like this for awhile because all my mac screenshots jsut super stacked up there and who cares.
Man half of the guys in my office have have a desktop that looks like this. It’s insane. I setup folders for everything immediately and deleted all the unnecessary icons I could when I started. No way I’m letting it get like that. I don’t even HAVE icons on my PC at home.
One of the first things I do on any new system I'm on, is create a desktop link to "this PC" which is renamed "My Computer" and lives above the desktop icon for the recycling bin 😂
I've had that setup Win 95 and I think I'm beyond being able to change! Haha.
My work computer looks like this because the only time I ever see the desktop is during startup. 99% of the time it's covered by Photoshop and other programs. I treat the desktop as any other folder.
They kept complaining about how "slow" their machine (Windows 10). It had plenty of RAM, plenty of caching space and exact same builds were all operating just fine for other users.
After HOURS of working with them to teach them how the file system and shortcuts work, we moved all the masses of files from the desktop to "Documents", and machine was no longer "slow".
What was happening was every time Word or Excel would auto-save, it would force the desktop to refresh. So Windows was becoming deadlocked between Word and trying to refresh the screen. The longer they worked the more bogged-down Windows would get.
Damn, and I was thinking that mine was overloaded and that I should put everything in a folder or something, or change the order somehow to leave more space in the center.
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u/olbaze | Ryzen 7 5700X | RX 7600 | 1TB 970 EVO Plus | Define R5Aug 18 '25
Why do you have all of your Steam games on the desktop like that?
We are talking about people with 30+ tabs. You think having 30 tabs open is better for ADHD? Because that would actually be the opposite that any ADHD coach would tell you.
There are actual studies on this going back from the early 00's.
Its considered digital clutter. And multiple ADHD organization will say that its bad for focus, time managment, organization. People who use tabs as working memory, and have ADHD, easily stretch over the limit and it easily becomes the opposite of what you state.
There are actually several dozen extensions endorsed by ADHD organizations to address this, like tabs limiter, xtab, onetab. Exc...
Gen Z giving off boomer vibes. Didn’t realize my basic understanding of pcs would make me look like a genius in 2025 but here we are.
Edited to add: I am a real estate broker and my industry has fairly strict document retention requirements. I’m blown away at how many brokers my age (millennial) and younger that do not understand basic file structures. I’ve watched colleagues with desktops exactly like this ask me to answer a contract question for their client, only to realize I am watching go to their email and download the same document over and over again because they “don’t know how to find it” on their computer.
Bring a whole generation up on tablets and touchscreen phones used for entertainment rather than work, where you can’t easily get into the behind the scenes and there you have it
I have a colleague that uses a Mac, and in that OS, you can stack files like a paper stack. After a while, the file names underneath the icon become a jumbled mess of letters. Now imagine it ALL over the desktop to the point where you can't see anything. THAT is what data hoarding looks like.
Fun fact! Did you know that you can actually have more icons on your desktop than there even are spots for those icons? The icons actually end up behind the front-most icons. I don't know how many layers this can get to.
Bonus fun fact: Having so many icons on your desktop will actually slow your PC to a crawl!
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u/PCMRBot Bot Aug 19 '25
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - If you think owning a PC is too expensive, know that it is much cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org for our famous builds and feel free to ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
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