As a teacher: I would change the computer hooked up to the projector to Dvorak layout and forget to change it back.
Grey?
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.bat files to open meatspin until explorer crashed Setting tasks to open a video file on login
I was in a programming class in the 9th grade in which we were taught Visual Basic. I found out that you can run other executable from applications written in Visual Basic using the Shell command and that this bypassed whatever restrictions they had placed on our computers. I could open any Windows XP (I think?) admin utility this way. But more noticeably, I could open the previously disallowed crappy space pinball game. I showed this to some of my friends, and they did the same. A few days later, some of them are suspended for, no shit, “hacking,” because they were caught playing pinball. Not me, though. I kinda resented that.
Oh, I also did an infinite loop with the “Beep” command in it and this caused my computer to bluescreen and not come back.
We had an assignment to make a calculator app in c#. For the equals button I made it run shell(shutdown -s -f -t 0). It would schedule a shutdown to happen instantly and forcefully close everything. I submitted this assignment. My teacher said he was marking them and when he got to my assignment it shut down his computer and he lost his spreadsheet with everyone’s grade. He was surprisingly good natured about it.
That’s favorite teacher energy right there
netsend
It’s a little command line program included with windows that you can set up to send short messages to computers as a popup box. A lot of printers could use this to tell you your print job was successful, and it was used a lot in libraries and such. And also my high school. They had some cursory protections in place, but if you managed to open a command prompt you could send your own message. You just needed the recipients windows username or PC name… our school used the standard first letter of first name + full last name, even the teachers. So of course, being highschool, this spread like wildfire and there was a whole semester where everyone was abusing it to troll other classmates or interrupt teachers mid lesson. It was also being used as IM/text before any of us even had phones - you could shoot your friend a message to dip out of class or something.
Everything came to an abrupt halt when a guy was dared to run a batch file that was a single, looped, expletive laden net send to a wildcard recipient. It sent the message on repeat to every computer in every school in the district. Every time you hit ok a new box would pop up with the same message. Supposedly every computer needed a hard restart, including servers. Dude got in trouble, and our printers stopped telling us the print job was successful after that.
Had to scroll way to far to find this 😂 teachers got quite upset when we discovered this trick in middle school.
We installed Doom (1 or 2, I don’t remember) in an invisible folder and played via the 10Base-2 network. Those were the 90ies…
They had both NetSupport and DeepFreeze installed. At the time, NetSupport config files could be decrypted with a simply python script, and contained the password. Turns out, it was the general admin password.
So I had admin creds, full control of any PC with NetSupport, and the ability to install anything on a computer and have it survive past a reboot.
What did I do with it? Video games, mostly.
People still put passwords in encoded vbscript… If we could all get over thinking your code is some sort of special secret life would be so much better :P
I replaced one of the DLLs (winmm.dll?) with a DLL of my own. It got loaded before the login dialog and installed a hook that saved your login details to a file. This was Windows for Workgroups so no access controls for files.
That way we managed to get the login info for a teacher that nobody liked, then we filled his home directory with porn. IIRC there was a quota of 5 MB and after that the admins got involved.
That’s some serious dedication and understanding. I couldn’t build a dll until after highschool
I once switched the psu from 220 to 110 volts… while it was on
Haha can’t fool me my power is 110 :P nbd just a bit of a sad computer when you put the switch to 220 here
…what happened? I’d have to guess it immediately blew the fuse on the 110v circuit on the power supply and the computer shut off. I’d also guess that if you switched back to 220 it would still work? Unless the power supply divided the 220 in half and used the same 110v circuit…
It produced some smoke and I ran off.
Ooh, nice. Better than I expected!
I don’t remember messing with the computers thenselves, but I do remember my friends and I finding the password to the public wifi and connecting to it for all of like a day (w/ a VPN so as to not get caught) before getting booted off and the password reset. Rinse and releat a couple times before we couldn’t crack it anymore
My home room in middle school was one of the few classrooms that had windows pcs. They used deepfreeze to reset them daily, but I found some program that actually disabled it. I think I just installed firefox or chrome and then ran windows updates because they always had the annoying yellow shield system tray icon for windows updates needed.
So… You were the hero they didn’t know they needed
The school computer were running Windows Vista, poor things didn’t need to be messed with.
😅
When I was in high school, I reset the admin password on one of the macs in the computer lab in single user mode and used it to find the school’s Wi-Fi password in the keychain. Shared it with a few friends and it eventually made its way to most of the student body. It was a total game changer for all of us because we all had smartphones (this was in 2014ish) but the building had virtually no cell service indoors whatsoever.
Legit! I dreamed of having Linux in my pocket in high school :P
Set up a Minecraft server back when you could run the Java files off of a USB. ran for a while, nothing fancy.
I also renamed every calculator icon to “cockulator”. Boy oh boy did I think that was funny back then. (it’s still a little funny)
Wrote a TSR to beep the speaker gradually longer every time a key is pressed. The programming teacher assumed excessive beeping meant you were playing some sort of game. I’d run it on the PC I was using before class was over to get the next kid to sit there in trouble.
Make a forkbomb on classmates computers and run it.
