26th February 2001

April Fool's Day is right around the corner. Oh, don't worry... this year I'm not going to do anything with the mail merge feature. You gotta admit -- I tricked ya good! Anyway, here's how you can zing your friend (or enemy). First, you need to close all the open windows. Tap the "Print Screen" key and fly over to your default image editor (Microsoft Paint is sufficient). Now, paste in the image of the captured desktop. Save it as a "BMP" (bitmap) somewhere inconspicuous. Now, right-click on the desktop and change the wallpaper to the newly-saved image. Then, flip to the "Web" tab of the Display properties dialog and turn on Active Desktop. Be sure that the option for "Hide icons when desktop is viewed as Web page" is turned on. This setting can be toggled in the Folder properties dialog (press the "Folder Options" button at the bottom of the "Web" tab and flip to the "View" tab once there). Windows 2000 users can simply right-click on their desktop to "Show Web Content" (and subsequently, "Show Desktop Icons"). Get the picture? So will your friend. But what they'll be clicking on won't be icons... just a picture of icons. Evil!