6th February 2002
Here's a prank to remember in a few months (when April Fool's Day rolls around). Your friend will need to be running an NT-based operating system in order for this to work. Create a new desktop shortcut to CMD.EXE (which is COMMAND.COM's bigger brother). Now, right-click the shortcut and pull up its Properties sheet (or press ALT and left double-click it). Flip to the Colors tab. Set the Screen background to dark blue (0 0 128), and the Screen text to white (255 255 255). Flip to the Options tab and set it to open in a Full screen. NOTE: you can also use the ALT+Enter keyboard combo to toggle screen modes. Launch the shortcut. Ah, it looks like a new-fangled blue screen of death! And that's exactly what you're going to create. Kinda. Create a new document in Notepad and save it to the desktop as a BAT file (name it prank.bat). In it, you'll enter the following (with each line separated by a slash): echo off / cls / prompt Press any key to reformat hard drive. / echo You have been sacked by the moose virus. The most important lines are the first three; you can add as many "echo" statements as you'd like (to personalize the bug). Launch "prank.bat" from within the CMD.EXE shortcut you previously made.